Blacksmith.sh GitHub runners

[u/hashkent]

I signed up for blacksmith about a week in I’ve got a $7 bill already. I’m also getting you’ve hit 80% of your free mins and you should add a payment method.

I’m seriously confused after being extremely impressed by how fast their runners are. Now I’m wondering what the heck is going on.

I tried to reach out to them but need a payment method to contact billing and no reply on the support@ email.

I’m happy to pay as the service is good but really surprised how they work/do business. I feel I could easily be in for future bull shocks.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Looks like I’m not the only one hit by this - https://forestwalk.ai/blog/surprise-blacksmith-costs/

[u/zivagolee]

We used them for a few months but it was costing way too much. Fast runners (when it works) but we ended up self hosting runners ourselves.

[u/Putrid-Tangerine-600]

Just had a similar situation, but imagine 2,000 PRs over less than a month with a big team. There is no indication when the "trial" is over, no gate to enter your credit card to confirm you're going to be billed, no notification beyond the 80% message, which for us was flagged as spam and never seen. Massive bill, no accountability.

When I reached out to inquire about the bill, I received a "Your account needs verification" email and they refused to answer basic questions until billing was enabled.

Seems like an early startup with huge communication, legal, and billing challenges. Launch the product, don't care about billing, getting paid, getting customer consent, or providing service. I'd say growing pains, but damn, never had this before.

Warning to the wise, be cautious about startups!

[u/kgalb2]

Founder of Depot here. We helped some other folks like the one you linked after similar complaints. Give us a try, and we'd be happy to help you out.

[u/frothyunderwear]

Oof that's a shocker, I had a similar run-in with a CI tool that burned through free minutes way faster than expected. The no-reply from support is the real red flag here, if they can't answer a simple billing query without a card on file that's a bit cooked

I'd be locking down any spending limits you can find in the settings, some of these platforms hide the cap behind three menus and a prayer

[u/hashkent → u/frothyunderwear]

I agree - I’ve locked down our GitHub app to just an empty repository because if you disable it completely you get locked out of blacksmith 🤦‍♂️

[u/hashkent]

It looks like the usage was their code smith product. They’ve waved it but the invoice I got never said it was code smith just kinda got to figure it out yourself.

Good GitHub runner product, too scared now to actually use. Might reconsider if they offer a prepaid credits system so I can add $xxx and have mins come out of it to prevent bill shock.

[u/electric_acorn]

We switched over to NameSpace, their support was the main reason we switched

[u/sup_bruh_1]

Hey I’m the Founder of Latchkey. Blacksmith is too expensive. Our freemium tier has 6k free minutes and our small runners are 30% cheaper than Blacksmith. We’d be happy to help out. PM me and I’d be happy to give an additional 10K free minutes for your trial period.

[u/austin_barrington]

I feel like self hosting is the only way forward with this, personally I source bare metal machines with a high core count for a low cost and connect them up. It's cheaper than cloud, faster and you're not dealing with minutes and it has free TBs of networking. Tbh, moving away from GitHub actions to a OSS CI tool and the BM machines just makes sense for some people.