buildhound
Dashboard

Flat per machine. Never per minute.

Public repositories are free on any account. Private ones are $10 a machine a month on a personal account and $20 in an organisation, whatever the minutes.

Three plans

Both paid plans start with 14 days free, no card. Enterprise is quoted.

Free. For work in the open.

$0for public repositories

  • Public repositories on any account
  • Up to 2 machines
  • The audit, fix pull requests and failover
Connect a Mac

Personal. For your private repositories.

$10a machine a month, or $100 a year

  • Everything in Free
  • Private repositories on your account
  • Unlimited machines
Start a 14-day trial

Team. For your organisation.

$20a machine a month, or $200 a year

  • Everything in Personal
  • Private repositories in an organisation
  • Pools, trust tiers, roles and an audit log
Start a trial
Billed on the machines connected each day, averaged over the month. Cancel any time; a first invoice is refunded within 14 days if no job ran.

5,000 macOS minutes a month. $310 on GitHub. $10 on your Mac.

97% less than GitHub for one machine, and every job runs faster.

GitHub

$310

Blacksmith

$400

Depot

$400

WarpBuild

$400

Ubicloud

no macOS

Jog

no macOS

Buildhound

$10

List prices for a standard runner (macOS, 3 cores on GitHub), before free minutes, checked 13 October 2026. Ours is one machine on the plan chosen.

Questions

Which plan do I need?
GitHub decides. Public repositories run on your machines free on any account. For private ones, a personal account subscribes to Personal and an organisation to Team. Nobody is asked who commits. Without a subscription, a private repository's jobs run on GitHub-hosted until there is one; nothing is ever blocked.
Why not GitHub's own self-hosted runner?
You can register any machine with GitHub for free, and the job runs straight on the host: files and caches carry over, the job sees your network and keychain, a fork's pull request on a public repository lands on your machine, and a job for an offline machine waits up to 24 hours. Buildhound runs every job in a fresh VM that reaches the internet and nothing else, keeps forks and secrets where they belong, and routes new jobs to the healthy side when a machine is away. The full comparison.
Is it faster than running the runner on the Mac directly?
No, and we do not claim it is. A runner straight on the host keeps its caches warm; here every job starts clean in a fresh VM, so a cold build can take longer. What you get instead is isolation between jobs, no state piling up, failover to GitHub-hosted and no upkeep. Our speed numbers are against GitHub-hosted runners only.
What about pull requests from forks?
They stay on GitHub-hosted, and so does any job a stranger can start, such as one triggered by an issue or a comment. On a public repository the routing expression sends those to GitHub-hosted, and the control plane refuses them for your machines as a second line, on every plan.
How many jobs run at once?
Each job gets as much memory as GitHub's standard runner. A 24 GB Mac mini runs a macOS job and a Linux job at once, or two Linux jobs; a 48 GB one runs a macOS job and four Linux jobs. Laptops run one at a time. Light jobs can run more side by side if you allow it.
Windows?
Not yet. macOS and Linux jobs run today, and a Mac runs both. Windows jobs keep running on GitHub-hosted until we support them.