Comparison · developerz.ai vs Blacksmith
Faster runners, but the meter is still running
Blacksmith is a good answer to slow GitHub-hosted runners. developerz.ai is a different answer: run the jobs on hardware you already pay for, at a price that does not move when your test suite gets longer.
What Blacksmith is good at
Blacksmith runners are genuinely fast, and swapping a runs-on: label for theirs is about as low-friction as infrastructure changes get. If you want someone else to own the machines and you are happy paying by the minute, that is a real, defensible trade.
Blacksmith rents you faster minutes. developerz.ai runs the same jobs on boxes you already own, and the minutes stop being a line item.
Where we differ
| developerz.ai | Blacksmith | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Included in the AI-dev price, three concurrent CI slots per AI dev, nothing to count | $0.004 / minute (Ubuntu x64), $0.50 / GB / mo of cache, $100 / mo for a static IP |
| Metering | None. A job that takes an hour costs what a job that takes a minute costs | 3,000 free minutes a month, then every minute billed |
| Where it runs | Your VPS, always. The runner is a service on a box you own and can log into | Their fleet |
| Scope | CI is one lane of an App that also triages issues, hands off code and reviews PRs | CI runners |
| The switch | One label: runs-on: developerz-4vcpu | One label, to their runner name. The same shape of change, to a different provider |
| Job isolation | Fresh container per job, destroyed on completion; a repo-scoped token with a 15-minute TTL; fork-PR jobs refused | Their fleet, their isolation model, their infrastructure |
Blacksmith pricing quoted from blacksmith.sh/pricing, verified October 2026. We cite competitor prices; we never estimate them.
Switching
The switch is one line
The CI guide shows the exact diff, the runner-size labels, and the security posture (token TTL, container lifetime, and the fork-PR rule) before you move a single workflow.
Read the CI switch guide
Ship more. Maintain less.
We expect software to be written faster than any team can review it. Bring your repos, your boxes and your keys. We bring the org that keeps up.