An alternative to EC2 Mac for short jobs
EC2 Mac instances run on Dedicated Hosts, which bill a 24-hour minimum. offstage cloud bills by the second, so a 10-minute build costs you 10 minutes.
The 24-hour minimum
What a job that runs for 10 minutes costs on each service. Public list prices, checked 7 November 2026, before tax.
| Provider | Time charged | Total |
|---|---|---|
| offstage | 10 minutes | $0.18 |
| Scaleway, Mac mini M4 | 24 hours | $5.90 (€5.28) |
| AWS EC2 Mac, M4, US East (N. Virginia) | 24 hours | $29.52 |
| Daytona, macOS reservation | 24 hours | $60.08 |
- AWS and Scaleway charge the first 24 hours, then by usage. Daytona's reservation can't end early.
- Scaleway's €0.22 an hour is converted at the European Central Bank's rate of 6 November 2026 (€1 = $1.1165).
- Sources: AWS, Scaleway, Daytona, ECB exchange rate. Product names belong to their owners; offstage isn't affiliated with any of them.
How they differ
| offstage cloud | EC2 Mac | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A macOS user account on a shared Mac Studio M5 Max | A whole Mac on a Dedicated Host |
| Billing | $1.10 an hour, per second, no minimum | 24-hour minimum for the host |
| Lifetime | Up to 24 hours per sandbox, then it's wiped | As long as you keep the host |
| Admin access | No sudo and no Homebrew | Root on your own machine |
| CPU and memory | Shared with up to 7 other sandboxes, not reserved | The whole machine |
| Network | The public internet | Inside your VPC |
When to rent the day
offstage cloud is built for work that starts, runs and stops: a CI job, an agent's build, a test run. A whole-day rental is the better choice when:
- You keep a Mac busy most of the day. A whole machine running several jobs at once can cost less than paying for each by the second.
- You need root, your own macOS or Xcode version, or software that needs an installer.
- The Mac has to sit inside your own network, or keep its state from one day to the next.
Run a command
Create a sandbox, run a command, close it. The clock stops when you kill it.
import { Sandbox } from "offstage-cloud"
const sandbox = await Sandbox.create({ timeoutMs: 10 * 60_000 })
try {
const run = await sandbox.commands.run("sw_vers -productVersion")
console.log("macOS", run.stdout.trim())
} finally {
await sandbox.kill() // stops the clock
}The quickstart has the install and the API key. For CI, see macOS runners for GitHub Actions.
Try it
New personal accounts get $5 in free credit, about four and a half hours of runtime, with no credit card needed.
Read the docs, see pricing, or talk to an engineer.