Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a commercial service that runs GitHub Actions jobs on its own hardware. Teams switch to it by changing the runner label in their workflow files, so existing pipelines keep working while jobs execute on Blacksmith infrastructure instead of GitHub-hosted runners.

The vendor emphasizes faster hardware, caches stored in the same data center as the jobs, and Docker layers kept between runs on fast local disks. It also provides a console for GitHub Actions with global search across CI logs, views of failing and slow jobs, help with debugging flaky tests, and inline logs of failed tests posted as comments on pull requests. Blacksmith Sandboxes are listed as coming soon.

Blacksmith is a proprietary hosted service billed per minute, and the vendor says it costs less than GitHub-hosted runners. A free trial is offered without a credit card, and a pricing page lists current plans.