GitHub's hosted macOS runners are convenient until the bill arrives. Past about four hours of builds a day, a dedicated Mac Mini M4 or M6 from MacRent costs less, keeps a warm Xcode cache and doubles as a development machine.
See MacRent pricingGitHub-hosted macOS runners are the default for iOS and macOS CI: zero setup, a fresh VM per job and a large parallel pool. The price is the catch. The standard 3-core M1 runner is $0.062 a minute, the 5-core M2 Pro runner is $0.102 a minute and only available on Team or Enterprise plans, and macOS jobs consume included free minutes at ten times the Linux rate, so a Free plan's 2,000 minutes become 200 macOS minutes. Hosted macOS CI services such as Codemagic sit in the same range at $0.095 to $0.114 a minute. A single Xcode archive, test run and upload on a mid-size app is easily 30 to 40 minutes.
MacRent gives you a dedicated Mac Mini M4 or M6 at a flat rate: $15/day, $89/week or $159/month. Register it as a self-hosted runner and the per-minute meter stops. Xcode, DerivedData, simulators and your CocoaPods or SPM cache stay warm between jobs, so builds are faster too. When CI is idle, the same Mac is a full-admin development box you can rent online in minutes.
| Feature | MacRent | GitHub Actions macOS runners |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Flat $15/day, $89/week, $159/month | $0.062/min (3-core M1), $0.102/min (5-core M2 Pro, Team and Enterprise only) |
| Break-even | Daily equals about 4 hours of standard runner time, Monthly about 43 hours | Cheaper below those volumes |
| Free tier | None | Included minutes, consumed at 10x on macOS (Free plan: 200 macOS minutes a month) |
| Machine | A dedicated Mac Mini, the whole machine is yours | A VM slice of a shared Mac host |
| Hardware | Mac Mini M4 or M6, 10 to 12-core CPU/GPU, 16GB RAM | 3-core M1 standard, 5-core M2 Pro larger |
| State between jobs | Persistent disk: warm Xcode, DerivedData, simulators, dependency caches | Fresh VM every job, caches restored from the network |
| Parallel jobs | One Mac, several runners if the workload allows | Large shared pool, many jobs in parallel |
| Other uses | Full-admin development Mac when CI is idle | CI only |
GitHub Actions macOS runners details are based on publicly available information and may change, so check their site for current specs and pricing.
Ten 30-minute hosted builds a day is about $18.60 on the standard runner and more on the M2 Pro one. The same builds on a MacRent Daily cost $15, and on Monthly about $5 a day.
A fresh hosted VM re-downloads dependencies and rebuilds DerivedData on every run. On your own Mac the second build starts where the first one stopped.
GitHub's standard macOS runner is a 3-core M1 share. MacRent gives you a whole M4 or M6 Mac Mini with 10 to 12 cores and 16GB of RAM to yourself.
Between jobs the Mac is a normal full-admin machine: open Xcode over remote desktop, run the Simulator, test on Safari, or sign a build by hand.
A dedicated Mac Mini M4 on every plan. No quotes, no contracts, cancel anytime.
Where should your Mac be?
A whole physical Mac mini, just for you. Bare metal, not a virtual machine.
Delivered automatically, usually in under 5 minutes.
Same price for every model. Your Mac is assigned from what is free, and its model shows in your portal.
1 month of accessonly $5.30 per day
Renews every month until you cancel
Weekly and Monthly renew automatically until you cancel. Daily lets you choose at checkout: 24 hours only, or renew daily. Cancelling takes one click in the billing portal.
When you build less than about four hours a day, need many jobs in parallel, or do not want to maintain a machine at all. Hosted runners also give you a clean VM per job, which matters for some reproducibility requirements.
Connect over SSH, download the runner package from your repository or organization settings, run config.sh with the registration token and install it as a service with svc.sh. The self-hosted GitHub Actions macOS runner guide on the blog walks through it, including Xcode and code signing.
Yes. A MacRent Mac is a standard macOS machine with full-admin access, so any agent that runs on a Mac Mini runs here: GitLab Runner, Buildkite agent, Jenkins, or a Codemagic or Bitrise self-hosted setup.
Dedicated. Nobody else runs on your Mac Mini, you get a static IP, and the disk persists until you cancel. Daily rentals can be set to stop after 24 hours or to renew until you cancel.