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Zoomies and the runner services

Several companies sell faster or cheaper GitHub Actions runners, and they are good at it. They come in two kinds: services that run your jobs on their own machines and charge by the minute, and software you run in your own cloud account for a fee. Zoomies is a third kind: free software you run on machines you already have, wherever they are.

The prices below are from each company's own pricing page, as of September 2026. They change often; check the linked page before relying on a number.

At a glance

Where your jobs run What you pay Runner systems
GitHub-hosted GitHub's virtual machines Per minute, beyond your plan's included minutes Linux, Windows, macOS
Blacksmith Blacksmith's infrastructure Per minute, with 3,000 free minutes a month Linux x64 and arm64, Windows, macOS
WarpBuild WarpBuild's cloud Per minute Linux x64 and arm64, Windows, macOS
WarpBuild BYOC Your AWS, Google Cloud or Azure account $0.002 a minute to WarpBuild, plus your cloud bill Linux; Windows on AWS and Azure
RunsOn Your AWS account, on EC2 A yearly licence from €300 (free for non-commercial use), plus your AWS bill Linux x64 and arm64, Windows
Zoomies Machines you own or rent, anywhere Nothing, AGPL-3.0, plus the machines Linux x64 and arm64; Windows not yet qualified

For the per-minute services, the smallest runner of each kind:

Price per minute Linux x64 Linux arm64 Windows macOS
GitHub-hosted $0.006 (2 cores) see GitHub's page $0.010 (2 cores) $0.062 (3 or 4 cores)
Blacksmith $0.004 (2 vCPU) $0.0025 $0.008 $0.08 (M4)
WarpBuild $0.004 (2 vCPU) $0.003 (2 vCPU) $0.016 (4 vCPU) $0.08 (M4 Pro, 6 vCPU)

Sizes differ between services, so compare the machine as well as the price.

When a runner service is the better choice

  • You need macOS. Zoomies has no macOS runner image, RunsOn does not run macOS, and WarpBuild's BYOC pricing lists Linux and Windows only. Blacksmith and WarpBuild's own cloud do run macOS.
  • You do not want machines to look after. A per-minute service has no hosts to patch, no disks to fill and no images to keep current. That is most of what you are paying for, and it is worth paying for if nobody on the team wants the job.
  • Your load is bursty and large. A service or your cloud account can grow far past the machines you own; a fleet of your own hardware is only as big as what is in it.
  • You want what they sell on top. Blacksmith advertises faster hardware than GitHub's and faster cache downloads, with Docker layer caching and static IPs as paid add-ons; an enterprise plan comes with an SLA and support. Zoomies has a per-pool cache and none of the rest.

When your own cloud account is the better choice

  • You already run on AWS, and want CI inside the same account, network and bill. RunsOn launches EC2 instances in your account at spot prices with no per-minute markup, for a yearly licence; WarpBuild's BYOC does the same across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure for a per-minute fee.
  • You want a machine per job. RunsOn gives each job its own EC2 instance. Zoomies gives each job a fresh container on a shared host, see hosts and pools.

When Zoomies is the better choice

  • You have machines already. A server in a rack, a home lab, spare office PCs, a Proxmox cluster: Zoomies turns them into runner capacity with no per-minute fee and no licence. Runners in your home lab has the planning.
  • You are not tied to one cloud. Hosts can be anywhere an agent can dial out from, several clouds, your own hardware, or both in one fleet.
  • You want to read and change the code. Zoomies is AGPL-3.0 and developed in the open; running it for your own organisation, changed or not, asks nothing of you.
  • You want to run the fleet from one place. A live web UI, an audit log, and metrics for every host, pool and job.

Using more than one

The choice is per job, not per organisation, because every one of these is selected by runs-on. Keep macOS jobs on a service, run Linux builds on your own machines, and move a workflow between them by changing one line.

Coming from a service to Zoomies, the migration wizard reads Blacksmith and WarpBuild labels as well as GitHub's, proposes a pool with the same operating system and architecture for each, and opens one pull request per repository after showing you the diff. What self-hosted runners cost works through whether it pays.

Where to go next