Depot

What makes Depot different

Depot is a developer tooling platform designed specifically to solve the bottleneck of container image building. Unlike general-purpose cloud providers, Depot focuses exclusively on optimizing the build pipeline. It achieves up to 20x faster build times by using a distributed remote cache and optimized compute infrastructure that is separate from your CI runner’s local resources.

The platform integrates directly into existing CI/CD workflows, such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CircleCI. By replacing standard docker build commands with depot build, users leverage Depot’s aggressive caching layer. This cache is distributed and shared across teams and even local development environments, ensuring that dependency resolution and layer compilation are reused efficiently.

Additionally, Depot offers a Build API for programmatic image creation, allowing platforms to build images securely in isolated environments. This supports gRPC, Connect, and HTTP/JSON protocols, making it suitable for SaaS platforms that need to generate container images for customers without managing underlying infrastructure.

Pricing model

Depot operates on a usage-based pricing model. While specific per-minute or per-build costs are not explicitly detailed in the public marketing materials, the value proposition is centered on reducing CI/CD execution time, which directly lowers costs associated with GitHub Actions minutes or self-hosted runner uptime.

The model stands out by decoupling build compute from CI runner compute. Instead of paying for large GitHub-hosted runners to perform heavy compilation tasks, users offload this work to Depot’s optimized infrastructure. This often results in a net cost reduction for teams with frequent, heavy build workloads, as the time savings typically outweigh the per-build costs.

When it fits

• Teams with slow Docker builds: Organizations experiencing build times exceeding several minutes on standard CI runners.
• Multi-platform requirements: Developers needing to build ARM64 and AMD64 images simultaneously, where Depot provides significant speedups over emulated builds.
• High-frequency CI/CD pipelines: Projects with many commits per day where caching efficiency yields the highest ROI.
• SaaS Platforms: Companies that need to build container images for end-users programmatically via an API.

When it doesn’t

• Simple static sites: Projects that do not involve containerization or complex build steps will not benefit from the overhead of integrating Depot.
• Fully serverless architectures: If your entire stack runs on AWS Lambda or Vercel Edge Functions without custom image builds, Depot is unnecessary.

Inclusion criteria

Depot meets all three inclusion criteria:

1. Transparent pricing: Usage-based pricing is available via their dashboard and documentation.
2. Self-service signup: Users can sign up and start using the service via https://depot.dev/start.
3. Public SLA/Status page: Depot provides status updates and reliability information, meeting the transparency requirement for operational health.