Blacksmith

What do they actually do

Blacksmith provides a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners that aims to cut CI times and cost without requiring teams to rewrite workflows. Teams install a GitHub app and change a single line in their workflow to run jobs on Blacksmith’s infrastructure. Today, Blacksmith runs jobs on high single‑core performance machines, co‑locates caches, and persists Docker layers to reduce build and test wait times. It also offers CI observability features such as run history, logs search, and SSH access into jobs to help debug failures faster (homepage, docs/blog, pricing).

The company charges per-minute usage with a free tier that grants 3,000 minutes/month on 2 vCPU runners and pay‑as‑you‑go pricing listed at $0.004 per minute, plus optional add‑ons like Docker layer caching and static IPs (pricing). Blacksmith positions itself as a “one‑line” swap for GitHub Actions that advertises 2x faster runners, 4x faster cache downloads, and large Docker build speedups via persisted layers, alongside instant provisioning and high concurrency to avoid job queuing (homepage, docs/blog).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Early-stage product teams/startups using GitHub Actions heavily: Slow CI feedback and rising Actions minutes make it hard to ship without adding engineers; switching CI providers feels risky if it requires major changes. Blacksmith’s one‑line swap, faster builds, and lower per‑minute cost target this trade‑off (homepage, pricing).
• Backend teams building Docker images frequently: Docker builds dominate pipeline time. Teams want reliable cache reuse across runs to avoid rebuilding unchanged layers. Blacksmith persists Docker layers and offers cache optimizations to cut build times significantly (docs/blog, homepage).
• Platform/DevOps engineers avoiding self-hosted runner ops: Operating self-hosted runners introduces queueing, upkeep, and security overhead. Blacksmith provides instant provisioning and higher concurrency as a managed alternative with minimal workflow changes (homepage, docs).
• Engineering orgs needing better CI observability and debugging: Flaky tests and intermittent failures are slow to diagnose with limited visibility. Blacksmith adds run history, searchable logs, SSH into jobs, and CI analytics to shorten time to root cause (homepage, blog, SSH blog).
• Open-source projects and small teams sensitive to CI spend: Limited budgets and fear of overage bills push teams to free tiers or discounts. Blacksmith offers a free monthly minutes allotment and OSS-friendly programs to keep costs predictable while maintaining performance (pricing).

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: High‑touch outreach to GitHub Actions users in the YC network, personal contacts, and OSS maintainers; offer free trial credits and 1:1 onboarding to swap the single workflow line, then show before/after metrics on time and cost (homepage, pricing).
• First 50: List on GitHub Marketplace, post targeted technical content and examples (e.g., Docker cache wins), and enable self‑serve onboarding with workflow templates so teams can validate improvements independently (docs).
• First 100: Add partner channels (consultancies, tooling vendors, resellers) and light outbound to platform/DevOps leads; reinforce product hooks (Marketplace, templates, observability/SSH) and referral credits to convert mid‑sized teams while keeping self‑serve healthy (docs, pricing).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

The Continuous Integration tools market is estimated at about $2.09B in 2026, growing to $5.36B by 2031 (20.7% CAGR), indicating sizable spend on CI platforms and related services (Mordor Intelligence). GitHub Actions usage is large and growing; GitHub reported 10.54B Actions minutes in 2024 for public/open source projects alone, up ~30% YoY (Octoverse 2024).

Bottom-up calculation:

Scenario: 50,000 GitHub orgs with meaningful CI usage adopt third‑party runners for part of their workloads. If each averages 200k Actions minutes/month on third‑party runners and Blacksmith captures that compute at $0.004/min, annual compute TAM ≈ 50,000 × 200,000 × $0.004 × 12 = ~$480M. This excludes potential add‑ons and enterprise support. This is consistent with strong overall CI spend and rising Actions usage (Mordor, Octoverse).

Assumptions:

• 50,000 paying‑capable GitHub organizations have workloads suitable for third‑party runners (subset of total orgs on GitHub).
• Average of 200k Actions minutes/month per org are routed to third‑party runners; actuals vary widely by team size and stack.
• Price realized of ~$0.004/min for compute (per Blacksmith pricing), excluding GitHub’s separate platform fee and add‑ons (pricing).

Who are some of their notable competitors

• GitHub Actions (GitHub-hosted runners): Baseline CI for GitHub with native integration, large ecosystem, and hosted runners. Blacksmith competes on speed, cost-per-minute, caching, and observability gaps (GitHub, Blacksmith homepage).
• CircleCI: Managed CI/CD platform with cloud-hosted runners and strong developer tooling. Competes via ease of use, ecosystem, and enterprise features; many teams migrate to Actions or augment with third‑party runners.
• Buildkite: CI orchestration with self-hosted agents used by many scale-up/enterprise teams. Not GitHub Actions-native; notable alternative for teams wanting control over runners and hybrid setups.
• GitLab CI/CD: Integrated CI/CD in the GitLab platform. Competes when repos and pipelines are consolidated on GitLab rather than GitHub; less relevant if teams are standardized on GitHub Actions.
• WarpBuild: Direct competitor focused on faster GitHub Actions runners and caching; publishes comparisons with Blacksmith that highlight OS support and cache design tradeoffs (WarpBuild comparison).