Included in the AI-dev price — three CI runners per dev, nothing to count

Metering — Blacksmith

None. A job that takes an hour costs what a job that takes a minute costs

Where it runs — Blacksmith

Your VPS, always — the runner is a service on a box you own and can log into

CI is one lane of an App that also triages issues, hands off code and reviews PRs

The switch — Blacksmith

One label: runs-on: developerz-4vcpu

Job isolation — Blacksmith

Fresh container per job, destroyed on completion; a repo-scoped token with a 15-minute TTL; fork-PR jobs refused

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.

Join the waitlist See how it works

developerz.ymlLIVE

version: 1
budget:
 max_cost_usd: 5
policy:
 require_checks: true
 deny_paths:
 - infra/prod/**

Audited end to endGitHub-native workflowExisting checks stay in controlCost visible per task

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 CI runners per dev, nothing to count	$0.004 / minute, $0.50 / GB 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	Every minute is billed
Where it runs	Your VPS, always — the runner is a service on a box you own and can log into	Their fleet; bring-your-own-cloud is optional and CI-only
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 July 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

Put a fleet of AI developers to work

Bring your own keys and your own boxes, drop a .maintainer.yml, and let the loops run — audited end to end. Access is invite-only.

Join the waitlist Read the quickstart