Four options on the table: rent a dedicated ArmMini physical machine, buy your own Mac mini, use a shared virtual machine, or pay by the minute for managed CI. Everything below is backed by numbers — including the parts that don't favor us.
Reference config: a self-purchased M4 / 24GB / 512GB, matched against our Mini Standard plan ($200.7/mo). All external prices are 2025 public market rates, for estimation purposes only.
| Cost item | Buy M4 24GB/512GB | Rent Mini Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware purchase (one-time) | $999 | $0 |
| Electricity (≈263kWh × $0.15) | $39 | Included |
| Broadband upgrade + static public IP ($25/mo) | $300 | Includes dedicated IPv4 |
| UPS, cooling & rack accessories | $120 | Includes dual-feed data center power |
| Maintenance labor (2h/mo × $40) | $960 | Handled by the platform |
| Monthly rent ($200.7 × 12) | — | $2,408.4 |
| Hardware residual value after 12 months | -$550 | — |
| 12-month net cost | $1,868 | $2,408.4 |
Here's the part that doesn't work in our favor: if your home power and network are reliable and the machine runs at full load for the whole 12 months, buying comes out about $540 cheaper even with maintenance labor counted — and about $1,500 cheaper if your own time is free. The real dividing line in any TCO comparison is how much your time is worth, and how much a day of downtime costs you.
Renting also comes with three kinds of flexibility that don't fit neatly into a cost table: cancel the month a project wraps up, deploy across Singapore/Tokyo/Seoul/Hong Kong/Silicon Valley nodes without buying more hardware, and upgrade with a prorated charge for remaining days. With owned hardware, those three map to reselling at a loss, buying a second machine, and a full trade-in.
Most managed CI macOS runners bill by the minute (roughly $0.08–$0.16/min). ArmMini is a dedicated machine billed on a fixed cycle. The difference isn't just how the bill looks.
Run the numbers: a team building 150 min/day × 22 workdays = 3,300 min/month. At $0.08/min, that's about $264 — already more than the Mini Standard's $200.7/mo. Double your build volume and the bill doubles too; a fixed-cycle plan doesn't move. On the flip side, under roughly 1,300 minutes/month, per-minute billing is the better deal.
Managed CI spins up a clean machine for every job — DerivedData, SPM/CocoaPods caches, and simulator state all start from scratch, adding 5–10 minutes of cold-start overhead on larger projects. On a dedicated machine, all of that stays on disk between runs; you pick and switch Xcode versions freely and install whatever Homebrew tooling you need, with no image allowlist to work around.
Private registry credentials, enterprise certificates, and provisioning profiles need to be injected as secrets and unlocked into a temporary keychain on every managed CI run. On a dedicated machine, you import them once, the keychain persists, and fastlane match just reuses it. Internal dependencies can also be pulled over an SSH tunnel or private network instead of being exposed to a third-party CI environment.
A dedicated machine on a billing cycle isn't the right answer for everyone. Find your case below — don't pay for what you won't use.
Whether you're coming from another provider or your own Mac setup, it's the same three steps. Cross-node or cross-provider data transfers can be scheduled with free hands-on help — see the support page for details.
Pick a tier on the plans page and place your order — VNC/SSH credentials usually arrive by email within 10 minutes. Log in with ssh first to confirm the macOS and Xcode versions match your project's requirements before moving any data.
Re-clone your code from git; sync working directories and caches incrementally with rsync; export signing certificates as .p12, upload with scp, and import into the keychain. For large directories, run it inside tmux so a dropped connection doesn't interrupt the transfer.
Register a self-hosted runner on the new machine, run it in parallel with the old one for a day to confirm matching build output, then take the old machine offline. Keep a 24-hour rollback window — don't cut over and cancel the old plan on the same day.
$ rsync -avz --partial ~/work/ dev@your-node:/Users/dev/work/
$ scp ~/certs/dist.p12 dev@your-node:~/certs/
$ ssh dev@your-node "security import ~/certs/dist.p12 -k login.keychain"
✓ transferred 42.3 GB in 38m — resume supportedStill not sure? Use this table. All three tiers are billed monthly in USD; daily rates and full specs are on the plans page.
| Your use case | Recommended tier | Specs | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-project CI, light builds | Mini Basic | M4 / 16GB / 256GB | $21.5/day · $107.7/mo |
| Daily dev + multiple simulators | Mini Standard | M4 / 24GB / 512GB | $40.1/day · $200.7/mo |
| Unity / UE build pipelines | Mini Pro | M4 Pro / 64GB / 2TB | $59.3/day · $296.7/mo |
| 30B+ quantized model inference | Mini Pro | M4 Pro / 64GB / 2TB | $59.3/day · $296.7/mo |
Dedicated physical Mac mini nodes in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley, ready to order. Credentials by email, VNC + SSH included.