Latchkey vs Blacksmith: GitHub Actions runner pricing and feature trade-offs compared

Latchkey and Blacksmith both swap ubuntu-latest for a managed runner with a one-line runs-on change and bill per minute, so the decision hinges on price, platform coverage, and how failed jobs are handled. Latchkey charges $0.0025 per minute for a 2 vCPU Linux x64 runner, compared with Blacksmith's $0.004, but Blacksmith offers arm64, Windows, and macOS runners plus 3,000 free minutes monthly, none of which Latchkey currently provides. Latchkey adds a self-healing agent that retries transient failures inside a run, while Blacksmith emphasizes cached dependencies and Docker layer reuse through its own infrastructure. The comparison uses each vendor's published rates and documentation as of 20 September 2026, and cells lacking published figures are marked as such.
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