Latchkey launches managed GitHub Actions runners from $0.0025 per minute

Latchkey has taken its managed GitHub Actions runners out of beta. According to the company's product update on dev.to, the small and medium sizes reached production on April 19, with large and xlarge following on April 27, and jobs in any connected GitHub organization can now run on the service.

A one-line migration

Switching a workflow over means replacing runs-on: ubuntu-latest with a Latchkey label such as runs-on: latchkey-small. Steps, secrets, permissions, matrix builds and cache calls stay untouched. Latchkey's runners register with GitHub the way a self-hosted runner would, so GitHub remains the orchestrator: it schedules the job, shows the logs and enforces permissions. Latchkey only supplies the machine. Setup requires installing the company's GitHub App, and runners register at the organization level, so repositories must live in one.

Each job runs on a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 virtual machine that is discarded afterward, leaving no residue from earlier jobs — the company describes the rule as one job, one machine.

Sizes and rates

Four presets are live, and each step up doubles vCPU, memory and the per-minute rate:

Label	vCPU	Memory	Disk	Rate
latchkey-small	2	8 GB	100 GB	$0.0025/min
latchkey-medium	4	16 GB	100 GB	$0.005/min
latchkey-large	8	32 GB	100 GB	$0.01/min
latchkey-xlarge	16	64 GB	200 GB	$0.02/min

Latchkey notes the doubling rule turns sizing into arithmetic: moving a job from small to medium only pays off if it finishes in at least half the time, which big builds may achieve but lint jobs will not.

Three paid plans went live with the runners: Developer at $5 a month with 2,000 included minutes and one repository, Launch at $19 with 4,000 minutes and up to 10 repositories, and Scale at $49 with 6,000 minutes and up to 40 repositories. Overage is metered at the chosen size's rate, and a cost view breaks spending down by size.

The company's own comparison sets its 2-vCPU small runner at $0.0025 a minute against GitHub's listed $0.006 a minute for the standard 2-core Linux runner, following GitHub's January 1, 2026 price cut — $25 versus $60 for 10,000 Linux minutes, before included minutes and plan fees on either side. Latchkey calls this a per-minute comparison, not a bill forecast, since real costs depend on job mix and durations.

Parity and caching

The base image aims to match GitHub's Ubuntu 24.04 hosted runner — same compilers, language runtimes, Docker with BuildKit, browsers, databases and CLIs, in the same locations — so actions/setup-* steps find preinstalled tooling instead of downloading it. actions/cache works unchanged, with caches stored near the runner and isolated per organization. Launch and Scale plans keep machines pre-warmed so busy repositories do not wait on a boot, and a job falls back to a fresh machine if none is free.

Latchkey says it is not publishing startup-time numbers yet, preferring to measure properly across sizes and regions, and that anything which works on GitHub's runner but fails on theirs is treated as a parity bug to fix in the image rather than a workflow change.

Custom runners from a repository scan

Beyond the presets, Latchkey can build custom runner images. An AI agent scans a repository's workflows, package manifests, Dockerfiles and build scripts, then reports the detected stack, a recommended size, and the packages jobs install on every run. It proposes workflow rewrites — the runs-on change, removal of setup steps the new image covers, caching added where it helps — with each change labelled and uncertain parts left exactly as they were. Nothing is built or touches the repository until a user approves. Latchkey then bakes dependencies, pinned runtimes, preloaded Docker images and environment variables into an image and opens a single pull request summarising the changes; merging it is optional.

The update also lists a rebuilt Runners page with per-size cost breakdowns, a Knowledge feature that lets teams upload docs and runbooks and search them from the dashboard, and self-service account deletion. Self-healing runners are next on the roadmap, and the team says it will be at Web Summit Vancouver on May 11–14.

Why it matters

GitHub's hosted runners give every job the same fixed machine, whether it is a lint check or a monorepo build, and cost arrives as one opaque number. Latchkey's bet is that most CI complaints are runner problems, not workflow problems, and that changing what executes the job — one line in a file — beats re-engineering pipelines. The per-minute rates undercut GitHub's list price sharply at the small end, and disposable per-job VMs provide isolation by default. The caveats are real: every figure here comes from the vendor's own announcement, startup times are unpublished, and savings depend entirely on a team's job mix. For Linux-heavy CI, though, this is now a credible drop-in alternative worth benchmarking.