Depot

Depot is a remote build infrastructure platform that replaces slow, ephemeral Docker builds and GitHub Actions runners with persistent, high-performance cloud machines. We rate it 82/100 — an excellent choice for engineering teams whose CI pipeline is a daily source of frustration, particularly those running multi-platform Docker builds.

What Is Depot?

Depot was founded in 2022 by Kyle Galbraith (CEO) and Jacob Gillespie (CTO), two engineers who spent years watching their CI pipelines waste hours on Docker builds. The company went through Y Combinator (W23) and has since raised a $10M Series A (March 2026), backed by Felicis, Pioneer Fund, and individual investors including Solomon Hykes — the founder of Docker himself. That endorsement matters: when Docker's creator backs a build acceleration tool, it's worth paying attention.

The core insight is simple but powerful: standard CI providers throw away your Docker layer cache after every run, forcing you to rebuild from scratch. Depot keeps that cache on an NVMe SSD, permanently attached to a beefy EC2 instance (16 vCPUs, 32 GB RAM by default). The result is that once a cache is warm, builds that took 30 minutes now take 12 seconds. In 2025, Depot processed 100 million builds and saved engineering teams over 8.4 million hours — the equivalent of 968 years of developer time.

Key Features of Depot

• Persistent NVMe Cache: Unlike standard CI runners that start cold every time, Depot's builders maintain layer caches on SSDs with up to 500 GB of storage. Cache upload/download speeds reach 1,000 MiB/s — effectively instant. Teams routinely report going from 8-minute builds to 20-second warm builds.
• Native Multi-Platform Builds: Depot eliminates QEMU emulation entirely. When you target both linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, each platform routes to native hardware in parallel — typically cutting cross-platform build times from 20+ minutes to under 2 minutes.
• GitHub Actions Runners: Depot's managed runners use 4th-Gen AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs that are 30% faster than GitHub's native runners, at half the cost. They come with distributed cache built-in — no configuration required.
• Depot CI: A fully-featured CI engine launched in 2024, purpose-built for speed. Supports any repo and language, with job log search, usage dashboards, and GitHub webhook control.
• Drop-in Replacement: Migrating is literally replacing docker build with depot build. All existing flags and options work identically. Most teams are fully migrated within an hour.
• AI Agent Sandboxes: A newer addition — secure cloud sandboxes for AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude. As LLM-powered code generation accelerates build volume, Depot is positioning itself as foundational infrastructure for AI-assisted development.

What Users Say About Depot

User sentiment is overwhelmingly positive, with a consistent theme: the speed gains are real and the setup is shockingly easy. On the Hacker News Show HN thread from 2023, developers praised both the technical execution ("this is exactly how CI caching should have worked from day one") and the team's technical depth. On Product Hunt, the most common comment type was variants of "I just tried this and my builds went from X to Y." Complaints are rare but consistent: the $200/month Startup plan is a sharp jump from the $20/month Developer tier, leaving a gap that frustrates small teams who've outgrown the Developer plan's 5,000 Docker build minute cap. A small number of users on Reddit have noted occasional cold-start latency when builders haven't been used recently.

Depot Pricing

Depot does not offer a permanent free tier, but all plans include a 7-day free trial with no credit card required.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Developer	$20/month	1 user, 500 Docker build min, 2,000 Depot CI min, 2,000 GitHub Actions min, 25 GB cache
Startup	$200/month	Unlimited users, 5,000 Docker min, 20,000 Depot CI min, 20,000 GitHub Actions min, 250 GB cache, macOS M2 runners, RBAC
Business	Custom	Dedicated infrastructure, GPU builds, SSO/SAML, AWS PrivateLink, static IPs, custom compute

Overages are billed at $0.04/min for Docker builds and $0.004/min for GitHub Actions runners. Cache storage costs $0.20/GB/month over included limits.

Who Should Use Depot?

Best for: Software teams with Docker in their CI pipeline who are regularly waiting 5+ minutes for builds. Particularly valuable for teams building multi-architecture images (ARM + x86), microservices repos with many containers, or any organization where slow builds are visibly blocking developer productivity. At $20/month for a solo developer, the ROI calculation is instant if builds take more than a few minutes daily.

Not ideal for: Teams whose builds are already fast (under 2 minutes, infrequent), projects with minimal Docker usage, or organizations that need a full CI platform with advanced testing orchestration beyond what Depot CI currently offers. If your build bottleneck is test execution rather than image building, Depot addresses only part of the problem.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Dramatic, verifiable speed gains — multiple teams document 10–55x improvements with specific numbers
• Genuinely trivial migration (swap docker build for depot build — done)
• Per-second billing on CI prevents overpaying for bursty workloads
• Native ARM support without emulation — a major differentiator for Apple Silicon development teams
• Founded and backed by people who built Docker — unusually deep domain credibility

Cons:

• No permanent free tier — you must pay after 7 days, even for individual developers
• A steep jump from $20/month (Developer) to $200/month (Startup) — the gap frustrates growing teams
• Not a full CI platform; teams needing complex test pipelines may still need a separate CI tool alongside Depot
• Build infrastructure is cloud-only — no on-premise option below the Business tier

Alternatives to Depot

GitHub Actions (native): Free for public repos, but no persistent cache and significantly slower on compute. The starting point Depot is almost always compared against. Buildkite: A full CI platform with self-hosted runner support, but more expensive and complex to set up. Earthly: An open-source build tool with its own satellite service for caching; more configuration overhead than Depot but fully open-source. Namespace: A newer competitor offering similar persistent build caches with slightly different pricing.

Verdict: Is Depot Worth It?

For any team with Docker builds exceeding 3–4 minutes, Depot pays for itself within days. The $20/month Developer plan is a no-brainer for solo developers. The $200/month Startup tier is genuinely expensive for small teams, but the time savings at that scale (20,000+ CI minutes/month) justify the cost if even two engineers are waiting on builds daily. We rate Depot 82/100 — outstanding at what it does, held back only by the pricing gap and the absence of a free tier for occasional users.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Depot free?

Depot does not have a permanent free plan. All plans start with a 7-day free trial (no credit card required). Paid plans start at $20/month for the Developer tier.

How much faster is Depot than standard Docker builds?

Depot claims up to 55x faster builds, and user-reported results frequently show 10–40x improvements on warm cache. Cold builds (first run with no cache) are comparable to standard CI. The biggest gains come on subsequent runs where the NVMe cache eliminates layer rebuilding entirely.

Does Depot support ARM/Apple Silicon builds?

Yes. Depot runs builds on native ARM hardware (no QEMU emulation). Cross-platform builds targeting both linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 run on separate native builders in parallel, significantly reducing multi-platform build times.

Is Depot open source?

No. Depot is a proprietary commercial service. The CLI and some integrations are open source on GitHub, but the build infrastructure itself is not.

How does Depot compare to GitHub Actions runners?

Depot's GitHub Actions runners use 30% faster CPUs than GitHub's standard runners, at approximately half the cost. They also include Depot's distributed cache by default, meaning cache upload/download is up to 10x faster than GitHub's built-in Actions cache.