Depot vs Blacksmith: neither, if you want a flat GitHub Actions bill

If you're choosing between Depot and Blacksmith, you're choosing between two per-minute bills. Depot's plan includes minutes and charges for the rest; Blacksmith gives 3,000 free minutes and charges for the rest. Either way, more CI means a bigger invoice.

Skipbox is the third option: a flat $39 a month with unlimited minutes. Change runs-on to skipbox and the job runs on a machine kept for your account.

Why shoppers end up on Skipbox

Depot and Blacksmith compete on per-minute rates. Blacksmith's is lower: $0.008 a minute at 4 vCPU against Depot's $0.012. But both bills scale with your minutes, and minutes keep rising. Skipbox takes minutes out of the bill entirely.

Depot, Blacksmith and Skipbox by the month

Jobs on a 4 vCPU runner:

At 20,000 minutes on bigger machines:

How the rival figures are counted, from each pricing page:

• Depot: its Developer plan, $20 a month with 2,000 minutes, then $0.006 a minute. A 4 vCPU runner counts 2× (8 vCPU 4×, 16 vCPU 8×). At these volumes Developer is cheaper than the $200 Startup plan.
• Blacksmith: $0.008 a minute at 4 vCPU ($0.016 at 8, $0.032 at 16), less 3,000 free 2 vCPU minutes.
• GitHub: its larger runners, after the compute GitHub Team includes.

A job that needs 16 GB of memory fits plan M (8 vCPU, 16 GB), and at 20,000 minutes $79 is still below either 4 vCPU bill. Try your own numbers in the calculator on the home page.

The limits you'll hit on each

Depot

• Included minutes "are not a hard cap": past them, every minute is billed, and larger runners use them up 2× to 8× faster.
• Jobs run on EC2 instances that are never reused. What survives is what you put in Depot Cache: 25 GB on Developer, 250 GB on Startup, then $0.20 per GB a month.
• Runners work only for repositories owned by organizations.

Blacksmith

• No monthly ceiling: every minute past the free tier is billed.
• Each job's microVM is destroyed with its filesystem when the job ends.
• The actions/cache backend is capped at 25 GB per repository per week; Docker layer caching and sticky disks cost $0.50 per GB a month, and a Docker cache is dropped after 7 days without a build.

The pattern is the same: a new machine every job, caches bolted on and metered, and a bill that follows your minutes.

What Skipbox does instead

A flat price

Unlimited minutes. Jobs beyond what your plans run at once wait their turn instead of adding to the bill.

A machine that keeps its work

Your account gets its own machine, kept between jobs. Docker images and build cache, package caches and installed tools are still on disk when the next job starts, so it skips the downloads and the layer rebuilds. There's 7× more disk for them than GitHub's default cache, with no per-GB fee.

Nobody on your team runs it

Skipbox handles the machine, OS and tool updates, cleanup after every job, health checks and automatic rebuilds.

Moving is one line

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: skipbox # was depot-ubuntu-24.04-4 or blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm test

1. Sign in to Skipbox with GitHub.
2. Install the Skipbox GitHub app and pick the repositories.
3. Change runs-on and push.

Use skipbox-8x16 for 8 vCPU jobs and skipbox-16x32 for 16 vCPU jobs.

Security

• Your machine runs only your account's jobs.
• Runner credentials, processes and containers are wiped after every job. From 13 November 2026, your checkout and its build output (Cargo's target/) stay on your own machine for your next jobs; Clean every job gives each job a fresh machine.
• Code from people without write access (such as pull requests from forks) runs on a fresh, single-use machine.

See job isolation for the details.

Try it before you pick

The trial is free, takes no card, and lasts 7 days or 3,000 job-minutes. Point one job you were about to move to Depot or Blacksmith at runs-on: skipbox instead, and compare the second run and the bill.

Updated November 11, 2026