The thing is, once you start paying for it, then a service like blacksmith is so attractive and easy to replace gh, that it seems a no brainer. We swapped like 30-40 gh actions from gh runners to Blacksmith runners and cut our ci times by about 4x on almost all of our workflows. And all you do is auth their gh app and update an image tag.

Especially if you can take advantage of the high vcpu runners, then you can get some really fast pipelines going (not affiliated w/ them, just an enjoyer).