Customer Stories
How Laravel Cloud Gave Developers Control Over Usage-Based Costs
Anh-Tho Chuong•4 min read
From 700 to 6,000+ companies: How Blacksmith scales usage-based billing with Lago
Lago gave us the API-first infrastructure and usage-based billing capabilities we needed without the overhead of building it ourselves.
Aayush Shah
Co-founder, Blacksmith
Company Background
Blacksmith (YC W24) builds purpose-built infrastructure and software for validating code. Its CI cloud runs GitHub Actions workloads on dedicated compute, with caching and storage optimized for CI.
In August 2026, Blacksmith announced a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV, with Y Combinator and GV participating. The round valued Blacksmith at $550 million and brought its disclosed funding to $58.5 million.
More than 6,000 companies now run CI on Blacksmith, including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Mercury. That is up from approximately 800 companies when Blacksmith announced its Series A in September 2025.
Its infrastructure is scaling with that demand. Since the beginning of 2026, the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith has grown by 5–10% week over week. The company manages hundreds of thousands of compute cores and plans to grow that footprint tenfold.
The Challenge
Blacksmith's GitHub Actions service bills for compute rather than seats. Each job can vary by machine type, architecture and runtime, while enterprise agreements add custom rates, add-ons and overrides. Billing has to meter those variables accurately without limiting how the team packages or prices the product.
As former infrastructure engineers at companies including Cockroach Labs, Blacksmith's founders understood the cost of building and maintaining that system in-house. They wanted billing infrastructure that could keep pace with rapid customer and usage growth without pulling engineers away from the CI cloud.
Why Lago
Lago gave Blacksmith API-first billing infrastructure that fit its developer-led stack. The team could integrate usage metering and billing without turning every pricing change into a new internal engineering project.
Lago's open-source foundation also gave Blacksmith visibility into the billing engine and room to customize it. That mattered for a team building its own infrastructure from the hardware up.
Lago supports the usage-based billing models behind Blacksmith's compute-intensive service, including complex metering, aggregation, enterprise overrides and add-ons.
Built to keep pace with Blacksmith
Blacksmith went live with Lago in January 2025. Since then, it has grown from 700+ paying customers in its first year to more than 6,000 companies running CI on its platform.
That growth now includes millions of CI jobs every month and a compute fleet measured in hundreds of thousands of cores. Lago gives Blacksmith a billing foundation that can absorb changing usage patterns while the team experiments with pricing, adds compute options and expands enterprise contracts.
Blacksmith's engineers can keep their attention on the validation infrastructure developers and coding agents rely on, while metering and billing scale behind it.
