The rate card, side by side
Everything below uses one SKU: Mac Mini M4 · 16GB / 256GB, dedicated hardware, any region. Same machine on every term — you only choose how long you commit.
| Term | Price | Effective per day |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Day | $19.3 /day | $19.3 |
| Weekly | $52.2 /wk | $7.46 |
| Monthly | $96.7 /mo | $3.22 |
| Quarterly | $263 /qtr | $2.92 |
Two numbers matter more than the sticker prices. First: the daily rate drops roughly 85% between the shortest and longest term. Second: each step up breaks even fast. Memorize these three thresholds and you can skip the rest of the article:
- A week costs the same as 2.7 daily rentals — from day 3, weekly wins.
- A month costs the same as 1.85 weeks — from the second full week, monthly wins.
- A quarter costs the same as 2.72 months — if the machine survives to month 3, quarterly wins.
Scenario 1: the one-off packaging day
The job: notarize a macOS build, re-sign an IPA with a renewed certificate, or reproduce a bug that only shows up on real Apple silicon. You need macOS for an afternoon, maybe a day of retries, then never again this month.
1 day $19.3 2 days $38.6 still under weekly ($52.2) 3 days $57.9 weekly is now cheaper
Rent the day. At $19.3/day you pay for exactly the window you use, and there is nothing to cancel afterwards — the term simply ends. Two retry days later you are at $38.6, still under the weekly price. Only when a "quick job" stretches to a third day does the weekly term overtake it, and by then you have learned something about the job.
Verdict: 1–2 days of actual work → daily. Expecting retries past day 2 → book a week up front and stop counting hours.
Scenario 2: the two-week sprint
The job: a client engagement, a release-hardening sprint, or porting a build system — bounded work with a known end date about two weeks out. Intuition says "two weekly terms". The rate card disagrees.
2 weeks (weekly x2) $104.4 1 month $96.7 cheaper AND covers overrun 9 days (week + 2 days) $90.8 only wins if you truly stop
Two weekly cycles cost $104.4 — already more than a full month at $96.7. So for any project that plausibly runs 12+ days, book monthly: it is cheaper than two weeks and buys you slack for the overrun every sprint has. The weekly term earns its keep in the 3-to-9-day band, where a week plus a couple of daily extensions ($90.8 for 9 days) still undercuts the month.
One more sprint-specific point: keep the environment, not just the machine. A provisioned runner with Xcode, certificates and caches in place is worth more mid-sprint than the few dollars a shorter term saves — rebuilding that state costs an engineer-hour or two, which dwarfs the spread.
Verdict: 3–9 days → weekly, extend by the day if needed. Anything that smells like two weeks → monthly, because $104.4 > $96.7.
Scenario 3: the always-on CI node
The job: a self-hosted runner building every push — the setup we walked through in our Xcode CI guide. This machine is infrastructure. It does not get returned; the only question is how you pay for it.
3 months (monthly x3) $290.1 1 quarter $263.0 saves $27.1 (~9%) 12 months (monthly) $1160.4 4 quarters $1052.0 saves $108.4/yr
Three monthly cycles run $290.1 against $263 for the quarter — $27.1 saved per quarter for a commitment you were going to make anyway. Over a year the gap widens to $108.4: enough to fund more than five extra packaging days from Scenario 1.
Add-ons follow the same curve. A CI node that hoards DerivedData and simulator runtimes wants the Extra SSD +1TB: three months of it billed monthly costs $35.1, while the quarterly rate is $31.8 — the discount applies to storage too, so size the disk when you size the term.
The only honest reason to keep a permanent runner on monthly billing is uncertainty — a project that might get cancelled, a team still deciding between hosted and self-hosted CI. Fair. Run one monthly cycle as the trial, then switch: after month 3 the quarterly term is strictly cheaper.
Verdict: permanent infrastructure → quarterly. Undecided → one month as a paid trial, then commit.
The decision in four lines
- ≤ 2 days of work → daily at $19.3/day. Pay for the window, walk away.
- 3–9 days → weekly at $52.2/wk, extend by the day.
- 10 days to ~2 months → monthly at $96.7/mo. Two weeks already costs more than a month.
- Anything permanent → quarterly at $263/qtr and pocket $108.4 a year versus monthly.
When in doubt, round down: every term on a dedicated cloud Mac mini M4 provisions in minutes, so under-committing costs you a checkout, not a shipping delay. Over-committing costs real money.
Run your own numbers
All four terms, every region and every add-on live on one page. If your workload does not fit the three scenarios above, describe it and we will do the math with you.