Highbeam is a New York-based neobank and finance AI platform for CPG brands. They are trusted by over 200 customers such as Alex Crane, Birthdate Co., NYON, Labucq, and have processed transactions totaling over one billion US dollars.
Being a fast paced company, they didn’t want CI to come between their ideas and customer value. At the same time, they are a team of 10 engineers. A talented team of 10 engineers, but they couldn’t afford to have dedicated engineers working on CI. It wasn’t a core focus for them. They just wanted to ship fast.
Problem: Moving away from GitHub-hosted runners
Prior to Blacksmith, they were using GitHub Actions with GitHub-hosted runners. From time to time, their engineers would complain about their GitHub Actions. In particular, they would complain about performance. It was slow, but it was never really a problem early on. But as the team grew, they saw themselves enter a vicious cycle. More developers meant more code, more code meant more tests, more tests meant longer CI times, and longer CI times meant frustrated engineers tapping their fingers waiting for it to complete.
What started as minor grumbles about "GitHub being slow again" quickly escalated into a productivity bottleneck that was costing them real development velocity. Their average time-to-merge had ballooned and disrupted their entire development flow — and their bottom line.
"Every month I would see my bill go up, while the CI kept getting slower. The more number of engineers, higher the bill, yet slower the CI. It was a vicious cycle."
— Gautam Gupta, CTO & Co-founder, Highbeam
Solution: Selecting Blacksmith over GitHub
Highbeam’s entire CI pipeline is built on GitHub Actions, so considering a drop-in replacement like Blacksmith was a no-brainer. Since Blacksmith is a drop-in replacement, it also allows potential users like Gautam Gupta, CTO & Co-founder of Highbeam, to skip the seemingly mandatory “Book a demo” flow that most B2B SaaS products require — and just try it.
While trying it out, they were especially impressed by how much more reliable Blacksmith was compared to GitHub. And when issues did arise, the experience was completely different. Instead of GitHub’s often impersonal support, Blacksmith provided fast, human help through a dedicated Slack channel. What's more, they appreciated Blacksmith's GitHub status alerts, which notified them of outages that GitHub was experiencing — many of which GitHub failed to report themselves. We were checking off all of the original performance improvements and cost reductions boxes and so much more.
The last remaining hurdle was security. Once they saw Blacksmith's SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, their concerns disappeared. What began as a quick “demo” turned into an even quicker migration!
"I’ve never had an easier time migrating to a new platform. Blacksmith made it so easy, it felt like cheating."
— Gautam Gupta, CTO & Co-founder, Highbeam
Results: From 30-minute to 15-minute PRs
Today, Highbeam runs all of their CI jobs on Blacksmith. Before migrating to Blacksmith, Highbeam's CI took around 30 minutes in total. After the migration, the total runtime was reduced to 15 minutes — including their build, unit tests, integration tests, and Docker images! Now that our Docker layer caching feature is out, they’re also looking into how they could speed up their Docker Builds even more, by up to 40x more.
What’s more, they saw a 70% cost reduction in their CI bill. They are now officially out of the vicious cycle they found themselves in. Highbeam’s engineer team went from finger-tapping frustration to actually looking forward to pushing code.
"As a CTO, if you're not having your engineering team use the fastest CI solution, you're choosing to be negligent."
— Gautam Gupta, CTO & Co-founder, Highbeam
If you find your engineering team in a similar vicious cycle, try us out! We’ll get you out of it.
