9 ms·

Surprise, pay $1000

394 points by apike 3mo ago

crohr 3mo ago
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.
- flyingshelf 3mo ago
  [dead]
- mplanchard 3mo ago
  TBF, I believe Blacksmith runs their own hardware, so they aren’t just middlemen. I still think the billing thing feels scummy, though.
Havoc 3mo ago
Why do people pay for runner saas at all? Theyre not exactly hard to DIY
- etskinner 3mo ago
  Presumably they wanted feature parity with Github Actions. If you have lots of workflows already defined in Github Actions DSL, you're not going to want to port them. And even if you do port them, the activities available in the place you port them aren't going to be the same as Github Actions; there won't be feature parity.
scared_together 3mo ago
How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?
- tadfisher 3mo ago
  Unlikely. But it is likely they will need to pay before resuming usage as a paying customer.
- valleyer 3mo ago
  Yes, civil legal proceedings (and/or hiring a collections agency) are generally how debts are pursued in the United States.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  They could if they feel it's worthwhile. Most companies don't, but most companies don't do most of the stuff mentioned in this article, because they're lazy. If they're not lazy they can absolutely follow up any unpaid debt in court, no matter whether you tried to use a virtual credit card or anything like that. In German-speaking (DACH) countries the companies aren't lazy and they will take you to court and the court will make you pay all legal and court fees as well as the debt. It's a near certainty they will bother. In the USA you're hoping they won't bother and they'll be satisfied with just banning you as a customer. I think this is because each party pays their own legal fees in the USA.
dd8601fn 3mo ago
That sounds sketchy AF.
- Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
  Actually quite common, as the cost to fight them isn't worth the legal fees. One must be extremely careful when signing off on something as a company representative. One internal IP lawyer wanted a legal journal subscription, and left the tap running after they left the firm... that one cost $8k if I recall, as the journal sold the delinquent account to a collection agency. Took 3 weeks to verify it wasn't a scam, as the companies usually go quiet without the account number etc. Some people are wired that way, and run their company on legal cons. Indeed, one doesn't want to have these people around your firm. =3
nailer 3mo ago
Blacksmith are wrong, but also they’re a YC company- they may be young founders that haven’t run a SaaS before and genuinely don’t know how to handle free trials.
- readthenotes1 3mo ago
  Or: they know exactly how to handle free trials
- garbagewoman 3mo ago
  Give the growth hackers the benefit of the doubt, you reckon?
  - nailer 3mo ago
    Yes. They don't gain much from pissing people off who don't have a card to bill.
- nullbio 3mo ago
  Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. If you can't understand this before it becomes a problem, you have no place running a SaaS business.
- didntknowyou 3mo ago
  well being a YC company im sure they know all the different trial and funneling strategies, they chose to hack it the sketchy way
rcleveng 3mo ago
WoW. That's certainly a surprise to me. I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card. I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service". I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials. With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.
- kylegalbraith 3mo ago
  Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises. [0] https://depot.dev https://depot.dev
  - KyleTheDev 3mo ago
    Site looks great! I did notice that on the `products/github-actions` page, the metrics for the zed-industries/zed repo are missing. It's showing a `NaNm NaNs` for both the With and Without Depot sections. Might be worth fixing it, as the current state reads as Depot providing no improvement for zed.
- ErigmolCt 3mo ago
  This is where the "billing is hard" explanation and the user trust issue overlap
- close04 3mo ago
  > I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card. Startups have to innovate to stay alive and YC never discourages this kind of "innovation" if the startup has the potential to turn into big dollars.
  - mystraline 3mo ago
datadrivenangel 3mo ago
Sounds like a business partner who will squeeze you again later
vee-kay 3mo ago
[dead]
arjie 3mo ago
Ah, too risky to try for small operators. Good to know. Thanks for the fair warning.
gblargg 3mo ago
> In order to use the Blacksmith Software Inc Service, You must set up an account. During the account setup process, You will be required to connect your GitHub account and install Blacksmith’s GitHub integration in your org, and add a valid payment method, such as a credit card, which will be processed through Stripe. Alternatively, for larger contracts, You may request to be billed via invoice. > By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms. Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.
nullbio 3mo ago
Infisical does this too. They don't make it clear that they charge you for projects and machine identities upfront, and then you get slammed with a $800 bill on your first month.
keyle 3mo ago
This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.
- dheera 3mo ago
  Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.
  - greyb 3mo ago
    They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback. Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.
    - dheera 3mo ago
      It's way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.
    - Natsu 3mo ago
      Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired. I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway. This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.
      - 3mo ago
aaronblohowiak 3mo ago
I can see their logic - instead of breaking people's builds, they are being the nice guys and letting you pay them back later. BUT, any time you break convention, you've dipped into your trust budget (even if you communicate it way more clearly than was apparently done here.)
yellow_lead 3mo ago
BlackSmith should get in this thread and explain themselves. Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?
zephen 3mo ago
tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable. You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop. The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.
- namenotrequired 3mo ago
  It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.
  - zephen 3mo ago
    There are two possibilities here: 1) They intended a bait-and-switch, where they were going to go after everybody for non-payment. According to the article, they might not even have a leg to stand on here. 2) If you take the quote from the company at face value, they realized that their free quota would be insufficient for conversion for some customers, and decided not to shut off services in the middle of evaluation. In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit. Now, you can argue (and many are) about whether this is a good business practice or not, but it really doesn't matter. After making the front page of hacker news, it's probably not one they're going to continue, simply because now that everybody knows about it, you'll probably have a lot of bad actors doing multiple signups, just to siphon off as much token usage as possible.
    - gblargg 3mo ago
      > In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit. That would be much more acceptable. If it worked out and you want to continue, you won't have a problem paying for the overage. If you decide it's not for you, then you can walk away and owe nothing. If it were communicated that way it would be a different situation.
tuananh 3mo ago
You should give Depot a try :)
MrAlex94 3mo ago
> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange? Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider. Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there. Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.
- 20thr 3mo ago
  Hugo from Namespace here. Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to be there for teams, appreciate you recognizing that.
zarzavat 3mo ago
This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up. There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people. In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austrian_at_domain_registry_is_threatening_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...
- nicbou 3mo ago
  This would not surprise me with a German service provider, although it got much better in the last decade.
- flyingshelf 3mo ago
  [dead]
- noja 3mo ago
  They do that or they did that? (you are linking to a decade old post)
  - zarzavat 3mo ago
    Seems like they still do: https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105 https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105 > I received a letter from the debt collection agency. What can I do? > If a domain hasn't been paid for despite several payment reminders from nic.at, the domain shall be locked and the open claim handed over to our debt collection agency. As a result, the invoice must be paid directly to the debt collection agency. Please contact our debt collection agency for more information Like TFA it's hard to tell if they genuinely believe that they are helping their customers by not discontinuing their service, or if it's a scam. I suspect a mixture of both.
mistermuckle 3mo ago
By reading this comment, you agree, etc., etc. ...boilerplate... ...more boilerplate... Terms... and conditions... ...limitations... ...liabilities...
- mistermuckle 3mo ago
  You now owe me $500.
  - mistermuckle 3mo ago
    The $500 is now overdue.
    - somewhatgoated 3mo ago
      By reading this comment, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  You can't start a contract merely by reading a comment, but you can start one by using a commercial service with a pricing model, after being informed that you should read the contract.
usernametaken29 3mo ago
This reminds me of OpenAI which allows you to overcommit on prepaid tokens and then tries to force you into paying overpaid charges. Only they really can’t. You can’t make someone pay for a service they didn’t agree to with billing that doesn’t exist. I wish OpenAI best of luck with their shenanigans
protocolture 3mo ago
Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous) They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data. I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.
- ErigmolCt 3mo ago
  This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default
  - Terr_ 3mo ago
    That makes me think of bank overdraft fees. They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-bad-guys-overdraft-fees-are-crushing-low-income-customers https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...
    - em-bee 3mo ago
      i always set my overdraft limit to zero. i never want to use that by accident.
      - Defletter 3mo ago
        It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.
kelnos 3mo ago
That's incredibly scummy. Article author estimates that "only" 5% of people would expect this outcome for a "try for free", "no credit card required" service, but I think that number is well below 1%. Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Only the no credit card part is surprising. Something like AWS will bill you for everything not within the free tier and expect YOU to keep track of what's in the free tier. But they ask for your CC upfront. It's not illegal or even unethical to bill someone who hasn't given their CC, but it's definitely unexpected.
lmm 3mo ago
Holy shit, all that and then they paid? Worse, decided to use this product on an ongoing basis? I'm not sure who I hate more, Blacksmith for doing this or OP for being such a doormat about it.
TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
It's a bizarre way to run a SaaS and their website in migraine-inducing.
drcongo 3mo ago
Good timing, thanks, just scratched Blacksmith off my shortlist. Depot is the current front runner.
nikanj 3mo ago
"I ignored a ton of emails from Blacksmith and then I was completely surprised by something that happened" Lessons learned: 1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails 2) Read your damn emails
- nerdile 3mo ago
  B2B is just businesses fighting over the value chain. Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want. If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.
  - nikanj 3mo ago
    The legal system generally disagrees with that take. ”It wasn’t worth the cost, so we don’t have to pay the invoices” is a tough sell for any lawyer
sshine 3mo ago
I'm paying $60/mo. for a Kubernetes cluster running Forgejo + Forgejo Actions with plenty of parallel CI runners.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- acosmism 3mo ago
  oh wow
- CornishPasty 3mo ago
  I'd love to see a write up on how you've got this deployed if you have one or are willing to share any repos?
  - sshine 3mo ago
    I have a ton of write-up that I haven't published. It's Talos Linux on Hetzner VMs where all resources are managed via kubenix, and all CI runners are running NixOS. So... extremely affordable and extremely performant, but very complicated. Drop me an email if you want the writeup when I get around to making it. Until then, here's a Forgejo Actions that compiles its own CI runner image: https://git.shine.town/infra/runners/src/branch/main/.forgejo/workflows/build-push-test.yaml https://git.shine.town/infra/runners/src/branch/main/.forgej... No Docker involved in the build process, it's all Nix. Unfortunately the CI runner itself is still Docker-in-Docker because: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/66#issuecomment-16287581 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/66#issuecomm...
- calgoo 3mo ago
  Yea same with our internal gitlab system with a EKS cluster for runners, maybe $100/month for the full infra setup.
rubyn00bie 3mo ago
While I think it’s outrageous to send invoices to folks who aren’t paying customers… I’m a little surprised the service even has a niche (I’m old). I guess, with ubiquity of containers in our modern workflows, it seems strange to pay a service for what I assume is a dedicated, or well provisioned VPS, just to run CI. Hell you can probably get Jenkins (further showing my age here) running in less than an hour with Claude, GPT, or Deepseek on an obscure provider that offers cheap bare metal instances. And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.
jruz 3mo ago
I’m running my own VPS with Woodpecker, paying for someone to do it for you seems absurd to me.
c-flow 3mo ago
This reminded me of our experience with Gusto - we signed up to their R&D credit payroll offset service in May last year - their offset fee is calculated as a percentage of the benefit you get. We filed our federal tax return in September, so there naturally wasn't any payroll offsetting until October. They still charged for services they didn't deliver so it was more cash out on day one which really goes against the purpose of the tool. They argued it was in the small print that said "we charge when you sign up" when I ticked a box. I thought that was quite outrageous. I still do.
- mohi-kalantari 3mo ago
  Can I ask how much did they charge you? for how long
  - c-flow 3mo ago
    About $330, per month, for 5 months.
beaylott 3mo ago
If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ https://runs-on.com/ enough.
- js2 3mo ago
  A couple caveats. Doesn't support EC2 Macs, so you can't use this to build iOS apps. (Understandably. EC2 Macs are a pain to support and can't reasonably be scaled elastically due to a combination of Apple licensing restrictions and Mac hardware being totally unsuitable to the datacenter.) Also, this is a EU company which may be a problem for US-based customers.
ErigmolCt 3mo ago
I can understand not wanting to kill someone's CI in the middle of active development, but then the product needs a very explicit consent step before converting free minutes into deb
cycomanic 3mo ago
Can someone explain this statements: > While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial. > And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this. So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.
- nanoai 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- nanoai 3mo ago
  [flagged]
wielebny 3mo ago
That's a typical discrepancy between how US and EU sees civil agreements. In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits. Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.
- mtVessel 3mo ago
  I dunno. I'm in the US and I feel that those saying they wouldn't expect to be liable for services they consume beyond free tier limits sound awfully entitled. I mean, it's a sleazy practice, especially considering how they word their emails, but I wouldn't expect something for nothing just because I hadn't set up a billing mechanism yet.
bartread 3mo ago
> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange? Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic. However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail. So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features. Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them. And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.
yowo 3mo ago
Unpleaseant experience and all, but sounds like complaining about not reading the full terms and then being shocked after the first bill, which is ok if you are buying a personal service, but that's a no-no in business. The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.
- Hikikomori 3mo ago
  Why would it be ok if you're buying a personal service?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Most countries have consumer protection laws, but they're only for consumers, due to the usual power imbalance. Power is expected to be balanced in B2B transactions - your lawyers spent as much time ensuring you weren't scammed as theirs spent trying to scam you - so there's no protection law about that. You get whatever the contract says you get.
    - Hikikomori 3mo ago
      Kinda sounds like the post I replied to was ok with companies scamming or using dark patterns on consumers. Even if they're better protected it's not like it's perfect.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        I read it as it's okay to complain if it happens with a personal service but for B2B your complaint is invalid.
harel 3mo ago
Thanks for the warning. I would have chosen to be pragmatic as well but with another vendor. While I applaud your generosity with trust mine would have been evaporated at the first invoice.
- twohaibei 3mo ago
  Whats worse, if people stay with them after such a scummy behavior, they will keep doing it.
Qhemlomo 3mo ago
Dark pattern, shitty behaviour. Nothing to excuse
ilaksh 3mo ago
This is another level up (down?) from the standard "gotcha, b####!" post-usage metered cloud service billing that requires a credit card up front which is the main business model for a surprising number of internet companies. They can keep doing it because a significant percentage of their business is from startups that are burning through someone else's money. But it's interesting that the only real difference is that they let you proceed without putting your credit card info in.
deleted 3mo ago
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c7b 3mo ago
I'm old enough to remember that capitalism used to always feel like this. Even worse. Predatory subscriptions, targeting minors in some cases (remember phone ringtones?), toll numbers, unclear fees, surprise bills (my favorite - roaming fees in your home country because the phone stayed logged into the foreign network after an abroad trip). Silicon Valley/YC style startups felt like a breath of fresh air. Generous return policies, subscriptions can be canceled monthly and even do so automatically in a lot of cases (eg disabled credit card). I guess the fact that a lot of what they offered has near zero marginal cost helped. AI changed that part, so we're back to what I would consider the natural state. The least-resistance path out of such a bad equilibrium is regulation. And they did add a lot of protections in the last decades, which probably helped too. Some would say places like the EU even added too many. But I'm pretty sure that "if you're using our product, you need to pay" would fly even in the most customer-friendly jurisdictions today.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  It would, and the EU would actually be worse on this. In many if not all EU countries (DACH at the very least) you'd have to pay because you agreed to pay, and you'd have to pay all court and legal fees you caused as well - while in the US the company is more likely to just forget about it and try for another customer.
mystraline 3mo ago
So ive done this before when I deal with predatory and 'free trial' companies. Go get a $20 gas station credit card. They get THAT card, and whatever name you want to provide. When they demand $x000 for their free trial, they get.... $20! And before anyone bemoans their 50+ page onesided "contract" that weasel-words revokes 'free trial'... Sure, they can publish a claim and sell off a debt to "John Q Public". We can see how far they'll get with that.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  If they can prove you agreed to the charges, they can follow it up with debt collection companies or lawsuits, and that will cost you a lot more than just paying what you agreed to pay.
  - mystraline 3mo ago
    Reread the last paragraph. And let me know how a lawsuit against "John Q Public" will go, along with an email from fakemail.net and a gas station preloaded credit card. Companies deserve this sort of treatment if they say shit like "FREE TRIAL" and silently convert you to 'you owe money' with no hard limits. And naturally, paragraph 37, sentence 12 includes this disclaimer. That should be blatantly clear, but its not cause they are scammers. So, fuck'em.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Oh, that's fun, because IIRC providing fake details makes it criminal fraud, automatically. They get to seek security camera footage from the gas station, subpoena your ISP to find who held your IP address (hope you used Tor) and subpoena fakemail.net for the same.
gadders 3mo ago
Standard growth-hack douche-baggery. You'd think the YC mentors would give advice like "Don't be a dick to your potential customers". Also I'd tell them where to stick their invoice.
knuckleheads 3mo ago
Not just the weird billing, which has been annoying the last month I've been trying it, but they have had a couple incidents lately where I feel like I got ripped off because their performance was so spotty and yet I was getting billed for it. https://status.blacksmith.sh/ https://status.blacksmith.sh/
deleted 3mo ago
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dkersten 3mo ago
Why am I not surprised that its a YC startup? Lately, being a YC startup seems to have become a negative signal for me, far too many grifters are getting funded by YC, it seems.
john_strinlai 3mo ago
>Blacksmith helps us build faster, and once we agreed to pay for the (actually useful) service, their support got friendlier. So… we’ll probably switch back. well, that was one of the most disappointing conclusions that i have read recently. i am almost more frustrated with this decision than i am with the billing shenanigans. please do not reward this scummy behavior.
s3cur3 3mo ago
Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud at various points (all three of which offer GitHub Actions runners at cheaper prices than GitHub themselves), I agree the billing here is weird. It's worth pointing out, though, that you have to use a lot of CI minutes to incur a $1000 bill. You're well outside of hobbyist levels, and that same level of usage would have previously cost double from GitHub themselves. This a business with serious compute needs, being asked to pay real money.
- justinclift 3mo ago
  Wonder if they'd be better served $$$ wise to use dedicated servers or similar?
  - Lalabadie 3mo ago
    Yes, having a performant CI server on premises would probably pay itself in less than three months. Startups are usually resource-rich and time-poor, and don't want to allocate employee time to infrastructure unless it's core to their business, so arguments for efficient spending there are easily overlooked.
  - ashkulz 3mo ago
    We used to have self-hosted runners on Hetzner dedicated servers, and we migrated to UbiCloud ~6 months ago. Unless you can optimise your CI runtime to be very balanced and fast, you're going to have a lot of jobs queued during working hours ... although it costs more per minute, the fact that CI jobs are bursty means it works out not too much costlier but with less queue time.
    - justinclift 3mo ago
      Oh good point. Hadn't thought of the bursty nature of the load. Sounds like you need to share infra with an org of similar needs in a vastly different timezone. I guess that's what SaaS CI solutions are in a way. :)
elnygren 3mo ago
Ooff, this seems a bit sketchy. We recently looked at GA runner alternatives and decided on https://avrea.com https://avrea.com. See if you have a better experience with them :)
- _Ormod_ 3mo ago
  Great that you liked using us. Happy to have you onboard.(Avrea founder here)
_pdp_ 3mo ago
I am sure Blacksmith is the easy path if you don't want to do any extra work and I am also sure their solution will scale much better as this is what they do full-time. However, I can share what we did to ease on our GitHub Actions bills if it helps. Effectively we have our own runners hooked so that a job is scheduled, a runner picks it up and goes with it. We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. It is about 6x cheaper if not more. The solution is not open source but it boils down to a Go service that orchestrates firecracker vms. All the vms are pre-warmed so there is always a fresh supply of workers to pick jobs of various sizes. It is basic and it works. We have not had any issues since deployed. The runners can be anything from 1 cpu 2 GB to 64GB 8 cpus. We can add more worker types in a config file. I am not exaggerating when I say that we used to pay 1000s per month for this. Now our bills are in the range of a few hundred. Other dev boxes are done in the same way.
- calgoo 3mo ago
  As someone who has worked with gitlab for the last 5 years, i find it amazing how over complicated the github flow it for CICD! Spin up a server and add the gitlab agent and done! You need more? Fine spin up a EKS k8 cluster and done!
  - js2 3mo ago
    You can do the same with GitHub Actions. Spin up a server and start the actions runner on it and done! But if you want to dynamically scale your runners in response to load using a Kubernetes cluster, then they provide Action Runner Controller and it's a bit more complicated.
- arusahni 3mo ago
  > We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. Caveat here being that GitHub is exploring charging a usage-based fee for self-hosted GitHub Action runners [1]. While they've halted it for now, it's something worth being aware of as you assess your costs. This is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the order of magnitude savings you've described. [1]: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler-pricing-and-a-better-experience-for-github-actions/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler...
_Ormod_ 3mo ago
Avrea.com founder here, if you'd like to try an alternative that won't surprise you with the bill, I'd be happy to give you some more credits for a trial.
tao_oat 3mo ago
I had a similar issue with Blacksmith, though it was something called "Sticky disk" that caused unexpected costs. I'm still not even sure what it is. It was disappointing to see -- I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible.
greg-m 3mo ago
Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith. I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will. There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it. First, we wanted to let customers start using Blacksmith without a credit card. Very few infra startups do this today - CC validation is great for anti-abuse - but doing so has let us support a much greater number of free users. Many of these free users have turned into full OSS sponsorships (most recently ccusage, and before that, OpenClaw) or large paying accounts, and we haven't wanted to cut those users off from trying us. It's a real pain point to find a credit card to put down for your company or OSS project's CI spend before you've even tried the service. Second, not having a credit card on file means we don't actually know when credit card-less users intend to continue past their free trial. Shutting down users CI workloads entirely seemed harsh, especially because doing so would fail builds and require a code change to resolve. If users could start without a credit card, we weren't going to then hold their runners hostage. Instead, we decided to just eat the cost for the small number of users who either abused our services or did not actually mean to use the service. This worked, mostly - though every month we have gotten a number of support cases with users confused about their invoice. If they didn't intend to use the service past the free tier, we've voided out the invoice, and often given credits against a future bill if they intended to use the service, but were surprised by the behavior. We have a lot to improve about our billing mechanics - but because our retention rate for these users has been so high, we have assumed great support could catch and resolve the ambiguity. That said, there's two changes we can make now: 1. we clearly missed the mark on supporting this specific case - we should have offered to void this bill entirely given the surprise factor here. 2. We're prioritizing up making progress on a Wallet implementation that will let folks choose to suspend their runners rather than let them continue to run after they use up their free tier. We also just launched a new billing/metrics view so users have better visibility into their free tier and Blacksmith usage. I'm sorry for the bad taste this has left in everyone's mouth - I'll be hanging out here and on greg [at] blacksmith [dot] sh if you want to talk about your account specifically.
- baobabKoodaa 3mo ago
cultofmetatron 3mo ago
I was thinking of checking out blacksmith for my own startup but yikes.. this kind of surprise gotcha is a major dealbreaker for me.
fred_is_fred 3mo ago
Ignoring at least 2 messages does not in-fact make a surprise if you just don't like what the messages said.
LastTrain 3mo ago
I would understand this coming from a consumer, but surely your company read the contract you signed?
benj111 3mo ago
This seems like the wrong tactic, even in a money grabbing sense. Either say one month free and end after that, or end after the free data amount. If the customer finds value they will sign up and be less likely to look at their credit card bills. This just pisses people off and puts the cost front and centre so they can't ignore it.
thundergolfer 3mo ago
> Well, we tried switching back to GitHub Actions, and… yeah it still sucks. Blacksmith has grown explosively because it makes an increasingly frustrating bottleneck in the dev cycle faster. Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.
zamalek 3mo ago
$1000 in a month? What on earth are you doing in CI? We're on Warp build (50% cheaper instead of 33%) with 6 people hitting it pretty hard across a few repos and only reach $150/mo. That's with building rust - a worse case than anything you're using for build time. 1. I'm not sure if blacksmith offers larger runners, but you if you're using them you have checked that bigger runners are worth the squeeze? A 2x runner does not mean a 2x faster build - I had a goal and sized CI according to that. 2. Caching. Nx can do this for your TS, provided your code is decomposed into packages. 3. At a previous job I had a post-run timings job. GH markdown supports Mermaid; I used a gannt chart to express it. I don't remember if the GH api supports getting timing for the current wf - so it may have been a second workflow. The first is just a little legwork, the rest your agent should be able to do in 5 minutes.
davidloibner 3mo ago
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lundstj 3mo ago
I would test https://avrea.com https://avrea.com They are from Helsinki, just launched and the founding team has multiple SaaS businesses behind them. Depending on the workload it could be really fast. And they are from Helsinki so big plus for anyone from Nordics.

394 points by apike 3mo ago

crohr 3mo ago

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.

flyingshelf 3mo ago
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mplanchard 3mo ago
TBF, I believe Blacksmith runs their own hardware, so they aren’t just middlemen. I still think the billing thing feels scummy, though.

Havoc 3mo ago

Why do people pay for runner saas at all? Theyre not exactly hard to DIY

etskinner 3mo ago
Presumably they wanted feature parity with Github Actions. If you have lots of workflows already defined in Github Actions DSL, you're not going to want to port them. And even if you do port them, the activities available in the place you port them aren't going to be the same as Github Actions; there won't be feature parity.

scared_together 3mo ago

How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?

tadfisher 3mo ago
Unlikely. But it is likely they will need to pay before resuming usage as a paying customer.
valleyer 3mo ago
Yes, civil legal proceedings (and/or hiring a collections agency) are generally how debts are pursued in the United States.
inigyou 3mo ago
They could if they feel it's worthwhile. Most companies don't, but most companies don't do most of the stuff mentioned in this article, because they're lazy. If they're not lazy they can absolutely follow up any unpaid debt in court, no matter whether you tried to use a virtual credit card or anything like that. In German-speaking (DACH) countries the companies aren't lazy and they will take you to court and the court will make you pay all legal and court fees as well as the debt. It's a near certainty they will bother. In the USA you're hoping they won't bother and they'll be satisfied with just banning you as a customer. I think this is because each party pays their own legal fees in the USA.

dd8601fn 3mo ago

That sounds sketchy AF.

Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
Actually quite common, as the cost to fight them isn't worth the legal fees. One must be extremely careful when signing off on something as a company representative. One internal IP lawyer wanted a legal journal subscription, and left the tap running after they left the firm... that one cost $8k if I recall, as the journal sold the delinquent account to a collection agency. Took 3 weeks to verify it wasn't a scam, as the companies usually go quiet without the account number etc. Some people are wired that way, and run their company on legal cons. Indeed, one doesn't want to have these people around your firm. =3

nailer 3mo ago

Blacksmith are wrong, but also they’re a YC company- they may be young founders that haven’t run a SaaS before and genuinely don’t know how to handle free trials.

readthenotes1 3mo ago
Or: they know exactly how to handle free trials
garbagewoman 3mo ago
Give the growth hackers the benefit of the doubt, you reckon?
- nailer 3mo ago
  Yes. They don't gain much from pissing people off who don't have a card to bill.
nullbio 3mo ago
Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. If you can't understand this before it becomes a problem, you have no place running a SaaS business.
didntknowyou 3mo ago
well being a YC company im sure they know all the different trial and funneling strategies, they chose to hack it the sketchy way

rcleveng 3mo ago

WoW. That's certainly a surprise to me. I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card. I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service". I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials. With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.

kylegalbraith 3mo ago
Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises. [0] https://depot.dev https://depot.dev
- KyleTheDev 3mo ago
  Site looks great! I did notice that on the `products/github-actions` page, the metrics for the zed-industries/zed repo are missing. It's showing a `NaNm NaNs` for both the With and Without Depot sections. Might be worth fixing it, as the current state reads as Depot providing no improvement for zed.
ErigmolCt 3mo ago
This is where the "billing is hard" explanation and the user trust issue overlap
close04 3mo ago
> I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card. Startups have to innovate to stay alive and YC never discourages this kind of "innovation" if the startup has the potential to turn into big dollars.
- mystraline 3mo ago

datadrivenangel 3mo ago

Sounds like a business partner who will squeeze you again later

vee-kay 3mo ago

[dead]

arjie 3mo ago

Ah, too risky to try for small operators. Good to know. Thanks for the fair warning.

gblargg 3mo ago

> In order to use the Blacksmith Software Inc Service, You must set up an account. During the account setup process, You will be required to connect your GitHub account and install Blacksmith’s GitHub integration in your org, and add a valid payment method, such as a credit card, which will be processed through Stripe. Alternatively, for larger contracts, You may request to be billed via invoice. > By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms. Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.

nullbio 3mo ago

Infisical does this too. They don't make it clear that they charge you for projects and machine identities upfront, and then you get slammed with a $800 bill on your first month.

keyle 3mo ago

This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.

dheera 3mo ago
Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.
- greyb 3mo ago
  They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback. Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.
  - dheera 3mo ago
    It's way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.
  - Natsu 3mo ago
    Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired. I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway. This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.
    - 3mo ago

aaronblohowiak 3mo ago

I can see their logic - instead of breaking people's builds, they are being the nice guys and letting you pay them back later. BUT, any time you break convention, you've dipped into your trust budget (even if you communicate it way more clearly than was apparently done here.)

yellow_lead 3mo ago

BlackSmith should get in this thread and explain themselves. Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?

zephen 3mo ago

tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable. You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop. The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.

namenotrequired 3mo ago
It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.
- zephen 3mo ago
  There are two possibilities here: 1) They intended a bait-and-switch, where they were going to go after everybody for non-payment. According to the article, they might not even have a leg to stand on here. 2) If you take the quote from the company at face value, they realized that their free quota would be insufficient for conversion for some customers, and decided not to shut off services in the middle of evaluation. In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit. Now, you can argue (and many are) about whether this is a good business practice or not, but it really doesn't matter. After making the front page of hacker news, it's probably not one they're going to continue, simply because now that everybody knows about it, you'll probably have a lot of bad actors doing multiple signups, just to siphon off as much token usage as possible.
  - gblargg 3mo ago
    > In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit. That would be much more acceptable. If it worked out and you want to continue, you won't have a problem paying for the overage. If you decide it's not for you, then you can walk away and owe nothing. If it were communicated that way it would be a different situation.

tuananh 3mo ago

You should give Depot a try :)

MrAlex94 3mo ago

> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange? Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider. Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there. Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.

20thr 3mo ago
Hugo from Namespace here. Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to be there for teams, appreciate you recognizing that.

zarzavat 3mo ago

This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up. There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people. In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austrian_at_domain_registry_is_threatening_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...

nicbou 3mo ago
This would not surprise me with a German service provider, although it got much better in the last decade.
flyingshelf 3mo ago
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noja 3mo ago
They do that or they did that? (you are linking to a decade old post)
- zarzavat 3mo ago
  Seems like they still do: https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105 https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105 > I received a letter from the debt collection agency. What can I do? > If a domain hasn't been paid for despite several payment reminders from nic.at, the domain shall be locked and the open claim handed over to our debt collection agency. As a result, the invoice must be paid directly to the debt collection agency. Please contact our debt collection agency for more information Like TFA it's hard to tell if they genuinely believe that they are helping their customers by not discontinuing their service, or if it's a scam. I suspect a mixture of both.

mistermuckle 3mo ago

By reading this comment, you agree, etc., etc. ...boilerplate... ...more boilerplate... Terms... and conditions... ...limitations... ...liabilities...

mistermuckle 3mo ago
You now owe me $500.
- mistermuckle 3mo ago
  The $500 is now overdue.
  - somewhatgoated 3mo ago
    By reading this comment, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
inigyou 3mo ago
You can't start a contract merely by reading a comment, but you can start one by using a commercial service with a pricing model, after being informed that you should read the contract.

usernametaken29 3mo ago

This reminds me of OpenAI which allows you to overcommit on prepaid tokens and then tries to force you into paying overpaid charges. Only they really can’t. You can’t make someone pay for a service they didn’t agree to with billing that doesn’t exist. I wish OpenAI best of luck with their shenanigans

protocolture 3mo ago

Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous) They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data. I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.

ErigmolCt 3mo ago
This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  That makes me think of bank overdraft fees. They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-bad-guys-overdraft-fees-are-crushing-low-income-customers https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    i always set my overdraft limit to zero. i never want to use that by accident.
    - Defletter 3mo ago
      It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.

kelnos 3mo ago

That's incredibly scummy. Article author estimates that "only" 5% of people would expect this outcome for a "try for free", "no credit card required" service, but I think that number is well below 1%. Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.

inigyou 3mo ago
Only the no credit card part is surprising. Something like AWS will bill you for everything not within the free tier and expect YOU to keep track of what's in the free tier. But they ask for your CC upfront. It's not illegal or even unethical to bill someone who hasn't given their CC, but it's definitely unexpected.

lmm 3mo ago

Holy shit, all that and then they paid? Worse, decided to use this product on an ongoing basis? I'm not sure who I hate more, Blacksmith for doing this or OP for being such a doormat about it.

TurdF3rguson 3mo ago

It's a bizarre way to run a SaaS and their website in migraine-inducing.

drcongo 3mo ago

Good timing, thanks, just scratched Blacksmith off my shortlist. Depot is the current front runner.

nikanj 3mo ago

"I ignored a ton of emails from Blacksmith and then I was completely surprised by something that happened" Lessons learned: 1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails 2) Read your damn emails

nerdile 3mo ago
B2B is just businesses fighting over the value chain. Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want. If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.
- nikanj 3mo ago
  The legal system generally disagrees with that take. ”It wasn’t worth the cost, so we don’t have to pay the invoices” is a tough sell for any lawyer

sshine 3mo ago

I'm paying $60/mo. for a Kubernetes cluster running Forgejo + Forgejo Actions with plenty of parallel CI runners.

deleted 3mo ago
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acosmism 3mo ago
oh wow
CornishPasty 3mo ago
I'd love to see a write up on how you've got this deployed if you have one or are willing to share any repos?
- sshine 3mo ago
  I have a ton of write-up that I haven't published. It's Talos Linux on Hetzner VMs where all resources are managed via kubenix, and all CI runners are running NixOS. So... extremely affordable and extremely performant, but very complicated. Drop me an email if you want the writeup when I get around to making it. Until then, here's a Forgejo Actions that compiles its own CI runner image: https://git.shine.town/infra/runners/src/branch/main/.forgejo/workflows/build-push-test.yaml https://git.shine.town/infra/runners/src/branch/main/.forgej... No Docker involved in the build process, it's all Nix. Unfortunately the CI runner itself is still Docker-in-Docker because: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/66#issuecomment-16287581 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/66#issuecomm...
calgoo 3mo ago
Yea same with our internal gitlab system with a EKS cluster for runners, maybe $100/month for the full infra setup.

rubyn00bie 3mo ago

While I think it’s outrageous to send invoices to folks who aren’t paying customers… I’m a little surprised the service even has a niche (I’m old). I guess, with ubiquity of containers in our modern workflows, it seems strange to pay a service for what I assume is a dedicated, or well provisioned VPS, just to run CI. Hell you can probably get Jenkins (further showing my age here) running in less than an hour with Claude, GPT, or Deepseek on an obscure provider that offers cheap bare metal instances. And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.

jruz 3mo ago

I’m running my own VPS with Woodpecker, paying for someone to do it for you seems absurd to me.

c-flow 3mo ago

This reminded me of our experience with Gusto - we signed up to their R&D credit payroll offset service in May last year - their offset fee is calculated as a percentage of the benefit you get. We filed our federal tax return in September, so there naturally wasn't any payroll offsetting until October. They still charged for services they didn't deliver so it was more cash out on day one which really goes against the purpose of the tool. They argued it was in the small print that said "we charge when you sign up" when I ticked a box. I thought that was quite outrageous. I still do.

mohi-kalantari 3mo ago
Can I ask how much did they charge you? for how long
- c-flow 3mo ago
  About $330, per month, for 5 months.

beaylott 3mo ago

If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ https://runs-on.com/ enough.

js2 3mo ago
A couple caveats. Doesn't support EC2 Macs, so you can't use this to build iOS apps. (Understandably. EC2 Macs are a pain to support and can't reasonably be scaled elastically due to a combination of Apple licensing restrictions and Mac hardware being totally unsuitable to the datacenter.) Also, this is a EU company which may be a problem for US-based customers.

ErigmolCt 3mo ago

I can understand not wanting to kill someone's CI in the middle of active development, but then the product needs a very explicit consent step before converting free minutes into deb

cycomanic 3mo ago

Can someone explain this statements: > While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial. > And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this. So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.

nanoai 3mo ago
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nanoai 3mo ago
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wielebny 3mo ago

That's a typical discrepancy between how US and EU sees civil agreements. In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits. Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.

mtVessel 3mo ago
I dunno. I'm in the US and I feel that those saying they wouldn't expect to be liable for services they consume beyond free tier limits sound awfully entitled. I mean, it's a sleazy practice, especially considering how they word their emails, but I wouldn't expect something for nothing just because I hadn't set up a billing mechanism yet.

bartread 3mo ago

> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange? Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic. However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail. So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features. Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them. And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.

yowo 3mo ago

Unpleaseant experience and all, but sounds like complaining about not reading the full terms and then being shocked after the first bill, which is ok if you are buying a personal service, but that's a no-no in business. The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.

Hikikomori 3mo ago
Why would it be ok if you're buying a personal service?
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Most countries have consumer protection laws, but they're only for consumers, due to the usual power imbalance. Power is expected to be balanced in B2B transactions - your lawyers spent as much time ensuring you weren't scammed as theirs spent trying to scam you - so there's no protection law about that. You get whatever the contract says you get.
  - Hikikomori 3mo ago
    Kinda sounds like the post I replied to was ok with companies scamming or using dark patterns on consumers. Even if they're better protected it's not like it's perfect.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      I read it as it's okay to complain if it happens with a personal service but for B2B your complaint is invalid.

harel 3mo ago

Thanks for the warning. I would have chosen to be pragmatic as well but with another vendor. While I applaud your generosity with trust mine would have been evaporated at the first invoice.

twohaibei 3mo ago
Whats worse, if people stay with them after such a scummy behavior, they will keep doing it.

Qhemlomo 3mo ago

Dark pattern, shitty behaviour. Nothing to excuse

ilaksh 3mo ago

This is another level up (down?) from the standard "gotcha, b####!" post-usage metered cloud service billing that requires a credit card up front which is the main business model for a surprising number of internet companies. They can keep doing it because a significant percentage of their business is from startups that are burning through someone else's money. But it's interesting that the only real difference is that they let you proceed without putting your credit card info in.

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c7b 3mo ago

I'm old enough to remember that capitalism used to always feel like this. Even worse. Predatory subscriptions, targeting minors in some cases (remember phone ringtones?), toll numbers, unclear fees, surprise bills (my favorite - roaming fees in your home country because the phone stayed logged into the foreign network after an abroad trip). Silicon Valley/YC style startups felt like a breath of fresh air. Generous return policies, subscriptions can be canceled monthly and even do so automatically in a lot of cases (eg disabled credit card). I guess the fact that a lot of what they offered has near zero marginal cost helped. AI changed that part, so we're back to what I would consider the natural state. The least-resistance path out of such a bad equilibrium is regulation. And they did add a lot of protections in the last decades, which probably helped too. Some would say places like the EU even added too many. But I'm pretty sure that "if you're using our product, you need to pay" would fly even in the most customer-friendly jurisdictions today.

inigyou 3mo ago
It would, and the EU would actually be worse on this. In many if not all EU countries (DACH at the very least) you'd have to pay because you agreed to pay, and you'd have to pay all court and legal fees you caused as well - while in the US the company is more likely to just forget about it and try for another customer.

mystraline 3mo ago

So ive done this before when I deal with predatory and 'free trial' companies. Go get a $20 gas station credit card. They get THAT card, and whatever name you want to provide. When they demand $x000 for their free trial, they get.... $20! And before anyone bemoans their 50+ page onesided "contract" that weasel-words revokes 'free trial'... Sure, they can publish a claim and sell off a debt to "John Q Public". We can see how far they'll get with that.

inigyou 3mo ago
If they can prove you agreed to the charges, they can follow it up with debt collection companies or lawsuits, and that will cost you a lot more than just paying what you agreed to pay.
- mystraline 3mo ago
  Reread the last paragraph. And let me know how a lawsuit against "John Q Public" will go, along with an email from fakemail.net and a gas station preloaded credit card. Companies deserve this sort of treatment if they say shit like "FREE TRIAL" and silently convert you to 'you owe money' with no hard limits. And naturally, paragraph 37, sentence 12 includes this disclaimer. That should be blatantly clear, but its not cause they are scammers. So, fuck'em.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Oh, that's fun, because IIRC providing fake details makes it criminal fraud, automatically. They get to seek security camera footage from the gas station, subpoena your ISP to find who held your IP address (hope you used Tor) and subpoena fakemail.net for the same.

gadders 3mo ago

Standard growth-hack douche-baggery. You'd think the YC mentors would give advice like "Don't be a dick to your potential customers". Also I'd tell them where to stick their invoice.

knuckleheads 3mo ago

Not just the weird billing, which has been annoying the last month I've been trying it, but they have had a couple incidents lately where I feel like I got ripped off because their performance was so spotty and yet I was getting billed for it. https://status.blacksmith.sh/ https://status.blacksmith.sh/

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dkersten 3mo ago

Why am I not surprised that its a YC startup? Lately, being a YC startup seems to have become a negative signal for me, far too many grifters are getting funded by YC, it seems.

john_strinlai 3mo ago

>Blacksmith helps us build faster, and once we agreed to pay for the (actually useful) service, their support got friendlier. So… we’ll probably switch back. well, that was one of the most disappointing conclusions that i have read recently. i am almost more frustrated with this decision than i am with the billing shenanigans. please do not reward this scummy behavior.

s3cur3 3mo ago

Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud at various points (all three of which offer GitHub Actions runners at cheaper prices than GitHub themselves), I agree the billing here is weird. It's worth pointing out, though, that you have to use a lot of CI minutes to incur a $1000 bill. You're well outside of hobbyist levels, and that same level of usage would have previously cost double from GitHub themselves. This a business with serious compute needs, being asked to pay real money.

justinclift 3mo ago
Wonder if they'd be better served $$$ wise to use dedicated servers or similar?
- Lalabadie 3mo ago
  Yes, having a performant CI server on premises would probably pay itself in less than three months. Startups are usually resource-rich and time-poor, and don't want to allocate employee time to infrastructure unless it's core to their business, so arguments for efficient spending there are easily overlooked.
- ashkulz 3mo ago
  We used to have self-hosted runners on Hetzner dedicated servers, and we migrated to UbiCloud ~6 months ago. Unless you can optimise your CI runtime to be very balanced and fast, you're going to have a lot of jobs queued during working hours ... although it costs more per minute, the fact that CI jobs are bursty means it works out not too much costlier but with less queue time.
  - justinclift 3mo ago
    Oh good point. Hadn't thought of the bursty nature of the load. Sounds like you need to share infra with an org of similar needs in a vastly different timezone. I guess that's what SaaS CI solutions are in a way. :)

elnygren 3mo ago

Ooff, this seems a bit sketchy. We recently looked at GA runner alternatives and decided on https://avrea.com https://avrea.com. See if you have a better experience with them :)

_Ormod_ 3mo ago
Great that you liked using us. Happy to have you onboard.(Avrea founder here)

_pdp_ 3mo ago

I am sure Blacksmith is the easy path if you don't want to do any extra work and I am also sure their solution will scale much better as this is what they do full-time. However, I can share what we did to ease on our GitHub Actions bills if it helps. Effectively we have our own runners hooked so that a job is scheduled, a runner picks it up and goes with it. We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. It is about 6x cheaper if not more. The solution is not open source but it boils down to a Go service that orchestrates firecracker vms. All the vms are pre-warmed so there is always a fresh supply of workers to pick jobs of various sizes. It is basic and it works. We have not had any issues since deployed. The runners can be anything from 1 cpu 2 GB to 64GB 8 cpus. We can add more worker types in a config file. I am not exaggerating when I say that we used to pay 1000s per month for this. Now our bills are in the range of a few hundred. Other dev boxes are done in the same way.

calgoo 3mo ago
As someone who has worked with gitlab for the last 5 years, i find it amazing how over complicated the github flow it for CICD! Spin up a server and add the gitlab agent and done! You need more? Fine spin up a EKS k8 cluster and done!
- js2 3mo ago
  You can do the same with GitHub Actions. Spin up a server and start the actions runner on it and done! But if you want to dynamically scale your runners in response to load using a Kubernetes cluster, then they provide Action Runner Controller and it's a bit more complicated.
arusahni 3mo ago
> We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. Caveat here being that GitHub is exploring charging a usage-based fee for self-hosted GitHub Action runners [1]. While they've halted it for now, it's something worth being aware of as you assess your costs. This is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the order of magnitude savings you've described. [1]: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler-pricing-and-a-better-experience-for-github-actions/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler...

_Ormod_ 3mo ago

Avrea.com founder here, if you'd like to try an alternative that won't surprise you with the bill, I'd be happy to give you some more credits for a trial.

tao_oat 3mo ago

I had a similar issue with Blacksmith, though it was something called "Sticky disk" that caused unexpected costs. I'm still not even sure what it is. It was disappointing to see -- I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible.

greg-m 3mo ago

Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith. I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will. There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it. First, we wanted to let customers start using Blacksmith without a credit card. Very few infra startups do this today - CC validation is great for anti-abuse - but doing so has let us support a much greater number of free users. Many of these free users have turned into full OSS sponsorships (most recently ccusage, and before that, OpenClaw) or large paying accounts, and we haven't wanted to cut those users off from trying us. It's a real pain point to find a credit card to put down for your company or OSS project's CI spend before you've even tried the service. Second, not having a credit card on file means we don't actually know when credit card-less users intend to continue past their free trial. Shutting down users CI workloads entirely seemed harsh, especially because doing so would fail builds and require a code change to resolve. If users could start without a credit card, we weren't going to then hold their runners hostage. Instead, we decided to just eat the cost for the small number of users who either abused our services or did not actually mean to use the service. This worked, mostly - though every month we have gotten a number of support cases with users confused about their invoice. If they didn't intend to use the service past the free tier, we've voided out the invoice, and often given credits against a future bill if they intended to use the service, but were surprised by the behavior. We have a lot to improve about our billing mechanics - but because our retention rate for these users has been so high, we have assumed great support could catch and resolve the ambiguity. That said, there's two changes we can make now: 1. we clearly missed the mark on supporting this specific case - we should have offered to void this bill entirely given the surprise factor here. 2. We're prioritizing up making progress on a Wallet implementation that will let folks choose to suspend their runners rather than let them continue to run after they use up their free tier. We also just launched a new billing/metrics view so users have better visibility into their free tier and Blacksmith usage. I'm sorry for the bad taste this has left in everyone's mouth - I'll be hanging out here and on greg [at] blacksmith [dot] sh if you want to talk about your account specifically.

baobabKoodaa 3mo ago

cultofmetatron 3mo ago

I was thinking of checking out blacksmith for my own startup but yikes.. this kind of surprise gotcha is a major dealbreaker for me.

fred_is_fred 3mo ago

Ignoring at least 2 messages does not in-fact make a surprise if you just don't like what the messages said.

LastTrain 3mo ago

I would understand this coming from a consumer, but surely your company read the contract you signed?

benj111 3mo ago

This seems like the wrong tactic, even in a money grabbing sense. Either say one month free and end after that, or end after the free data amount. If the customer finds value they will sign up and be less likely to look at their credit card bills. This just pisses people off and puts the cost front and centre so they can't ignore it.

thundergolfer 3mo ago

> Well, we tried switching back to GitHub Actions, and… yeah it still sucks. Blacksmith has grown explosively because it makes an increasingly frustrating bottleneck in the dev cycle faster. Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.

zamalek 3mo ago

$1000 in a month? What on earth are you doing in CI? We're on Warp build (50% cheaper instead of 33%) with 6 people hitting it pretty hard across a few repos and only reach $150/mo. That's with building rust - a worse case than anything you're using for build time. 1. I'm not sure if blacksmith offers larger runners, but you if you're using them you have checked that bigger runners are worth the squeeze? A 2x runner does not mean a 2x faster build - I had a goal and sized CI according to that. 2. Caching. Nx can do this for your TS, provided your code is decomposed into packages. 3. At a previous job I had a post-run timings job. GH markdown supports Mermaid; I used a gannt chart to express it. I don't remember if the GH api supports getting timing for the current wf - so it may have been a second workflow. The first is just a little legwork, the rest your agent should be able to do in 5 minutes.

davidloibner 3mo ago

[dead]

lundstj 3mo ago

I would test https://avrea.com https://avrea.com They are from Helsinki, just launched and the founding team has multiple SaaS businesses behind them. Depending on the workload it could be really fast. And they are from Helsinki so big plus for anyone from Nordics.