Self-hosted options spread fixed monthly costs over the monthly volume, so their cost per job changes with it; see the volume table.
Speed
× faster than GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest) · higher is betterCost per job
USD per $1.00 spent on GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest), at 100,000 jobs a month · lower is betterWorkload by workload
Blacksmith had the lowest median time of the two on 10 of 12 workloads, Self-hosted runners on AWS on 2.| Workload | Blacksmith | Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) | Lowest median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Burst: 20 jobs at once | 97 s | 161 s | Blacksmith |
| cli | 286 s | 357 s | Blacksmith |
| codex-lint | 448 s | 512 s | Blacksmith |
| container | 386 s | 247 s | Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) |
| fd | 65 s | 114 s | Blacksmith |
| flask | 22 s | 70 s | Blacksmith |
| guava | 735 s | 717 s | Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) |
| monorepo | 177 s | 281 s | Blacksmith |
| pydantic | 103 s | 154 s | Blacksmith |
| ts | 401 s | 433 s | Blacksmith |
| vite | 360 s | 403 s | Blacksmith |
| vue | 76 s | 117 s | Blacksmith |
Cost by volume
Mean cost per job in USD, from the benchmark’s sensitivity results| Volume | Blacksmith | Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) |
|---|---|---|
| 100,000 jobs a month | $0.482 | $0.383 |
| 10,000 jobs a month | $0.482 | $0.395 |
| 1,000 jobs a month | $0.482 | $0.508 |
Failed runs
Counted, never replaced- Blacksmith
- 3 of 360 measured runs (0.8%)
- Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job)
- 0 of 360 measured runs (0.0%)
Each configuration page lists where its failures happened. All losses.
All results for this pair
One line per configuration pairing, generated from the benchmark data- Blacksmith ran jobs 1.3× faster than Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) (95% interval 1.2× to 1.4×); Blacksmith cost 26% more per job (at 100,000 jobs a month).