Skip the middleman, just use AWS with runs-on.com (I'm the developer). Better instance choice, much cheaper, and you can setup an AWS budget alert.

TBF, I believe Blacksmith runs their own hardware, so they aren’t just middlemen. I still think the billing thing feels scummy, though.

Really nice, thanks!

Thank you!

I’m the founder of runs-on.com, we should talk!

So cool, thanks for sharing. Do you think it might be easier to maintain than something like `act` over the long run?

Pleasure! Yeah it's just the standard runner - the only thing we've built is a duplicate control-pane, which is just HTTP. Since I have the standard runners source code it's pretty trivial for agents to know what to implement on the other end.

Love the observability you’ve built into it. But push a little bit further the scale and you’ll probably hit limits with the persistent self hosted runner approach, and end up with something like runs-on (runs-on.com)

> You know how I know GitHub’s runners are bad? Because there’s an entire cottage industry of companies whose sole product is “GitHub Actions, but the runners don’t suck.” Namespace, Blacksmith, Actuated, Runs-on, BuildJet

He's not wrong. Buildjet just announced they were shutting down though, citing recent improvements to the GitHub Actions platform.

For the record I maintain the Runs-on [1] he's talking about, as a solo developer.

[1] https://runs-on.com

For alternatives, I maintain a benchmark at https://runs-on.com/benchmarks/github-actions-cpu-performanc...

Not fully OSS, but you can have a look at https://github.com/runs-on/runs-on

Thanks for posting this :) runs-on.com domain posts never get traction, wonder if this could be due to YCombinator investment in 5+ startups in that space... Oh well.

I am developing a self-hosted solution for this [1]. It’s true that it’s somewhat of a pain but JIT runners allow a lot of flexibility that we don’t find elsewhere.

[1] https://runs-on.com

I did something very similar.

Create/start/stop/terminate EC2.

https://github.com/redoapp/fast-actions-runner-ec2

In my experience even with runs-on it is a bit painful with runner cancellations.