GoKawiilLike many developer teams, we’ve been getting fed up with GitHub Actions. As our PR throughput has gone up, it’s increasingly obvious that our CI actions are too slow and expensive.
While there are a lot of ways to mitigate this, we’d been encouraged to try Blacksmith.
Blacksmith is a YC startup that bills itself as a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions, but cheaper and faster. So we gave it a try. Blacksmith imported our GitHub setup, and… it was faster! Maybe also cheaper, too, though that’s less clear when you’re on the free trial.
We got back to coding, as startups do, and before long we got an email about putting in a credit card:
We're writing to inform you that you've used up 80% of your free minutes for the forestwalklabs org this month. Please add a credit card on file to avoid disruptions to your service.
What we perhaps should have done at this point is stop and assess usage. But instead we did as early-stage startups tend to do, and we… continued coding until something stopped us.
A couple weeks later we got a “You’ve spent $500.60 on Blacksmith this month” message, which didn’t seem true since we were on the free trial still. Maybe that was what it would have cost if we weren’t on the trial? Anyhow, it was one of an embarrassingly large number of usage-warning emails in our inboxes, and this one neither had a credit card nor impacted production users.
A couple weeks later, we got in short succession another “Add a credit card to avoid disruptions” message, an invoice for $1081, then two days later an overdue notice:
This is a reminder from the Blacksmith finance team that some invoices are overdue. The total amount due is $1,081.45. Our contractually agreed payment terms require payment upon invoice generation.
Interesting!
... continue reading