Short answer
BuildJet for GitHub Actions announced on February 6, 2026 that it was shutting down: new signups stopped that day and runners stopped running jobs on March 31, 2026; its post tells users to move to GitHub-hosted runners. Measured managed alternatives in CI Bench v1: Vitko Runners (warm starts + test splitting) 2.3x faster at 84% lower cost per job; Vitko Runners 1.7x faster at 84% lower cost per job; Blacksmith 1.6x faster at 52% lower cost per job; Ubicloud 1.1x faster at 83% lower cost per job. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured.
What BuildJet said
BuildJet’s post “We’re shutting down BuildJet for GitHub Actions” (dated February 6, 2026, read 2026-10-27) says: new signups are no longer accepted; pay-as-you-go billing continues until March 31, 2026; on March 31, 2026 BuildJet stops running jobs; to migrate, change runs-on to ubuntu-latest (or ubuntu-24.04-arm for Arm) and replace buildjet/cache with actions/cache. Its reason, in its words: GitHub "has made substantial improvements" and "the gap we set out to fill has largely closed".
Replacements measured on 12 real CI workloads
| Configuration | Type | Speed vs GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest) | Cost per job vs GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest), 10,000 jobs a month | List $ per minute (2 vCPU) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vitko Runners (warm starts + test splitting)Vitko | Managed | 2.3x faster | 84% lower | $0.002 |
| Vitko RunnersVitko | Managed | 1.7x faster | 84% lower | $0.002 |
| GitHub-hosted larger runner (4 vCPU) | Managed | 1.6x faster | 39% higher | $0.012 |
| Blacksmith | Managed | 1.6x faster | 52% lower | $0.004 |
| Self-hosted runners on Google Cloud | Self-hosted | 1.5x faster | 59% lower | your cloud bill |
| RunsOn | Self-hosted | 1.2x faster | 75% lower | your cloud bill |
| Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) | Self-hosted | 1.2x faster | 60% lower | your cloud bill |
| Ubicloud | Managed | 1.1x faster | 83% lower | $0.00125 |
Speed and cost are the indexes in results.json, each against GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest); list prices dated 2026-10-05. List price per minute is not cost per job; faster runners finish sooner. BuildJet was not measured (it was already shut down by the time of this page's release).
Switching in practice
- Managed services in the table change one
runs-online; check each provider's own pages for the label and the platforms it lists (Arm, Windows, macOS). - Vitko Runners offers Ubuntu 24.04 on x64 only, for private repositories, in private beta.
- Staying on GitHub-hosted runners is the baseline in every comparison here.
More: 12 options compared · ranked by speed · ranked by cost per job · price per minute, 2 and 4 vCPU · list prices · free minutes. Alternatives to: Blacksmith · Depot · RunsOn · Ubicloud · WarpBuild · Namespace · BuildJet.
Method: how the runs were made; data: results.json; every raw record: the repository. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured. Page dated October 27, 2026.