Mac Colocation vs Rental: Account for Every Cost
Rental wins for one or two Macs; colocation needs a fleet to compete
For a single Mac or a small team, renting almost always costs less over three years once you add purchase price, shipping, remote-hands labor, and the rack fee. The crossover usually arrives around a full cabinet of Macs that you intend to run for four years or more. The worksheet below takes your real numbers and finds that line for you. If you want to skip ahead, Figment's rental options are at /mac-hosting and quotes at /mac-hosting/start.
What colocation actually costs
Colocation means you buy the hardware, ship it to a data center, and pay a monthly fee for rack space, power, cooling, and connectivity. The machine stays on your asset register and your maintenance contract.
Rack-unit fees. Single-unit Mac mini colocation in the United States typically lists in the $79–$150/month range for a 1U footprint, depending on power allocation and facility tier. Quoted rates vary; get the exact number in writing before you compare.
Hardware purchase. Check Apple's current store for the generation you plan to deploy. Pricing has shifted across the M4 and M6 generations, so use the live page rather than a remembered number: apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini.
Shipping and logistics. Shipping a Mac mini to a data center runs roughly $75–$200 each way with insurance. Budget both legs, plus any in-facility moves.
Remote hands. When you need a reboot, cable swap, or OS reinstall, the data center charges for technician time — commonly $75–$150 per incident, higher after hours.
Repair and replacement. You carry hardware risk. A logic board or SSD failure means an Apple repair ticket and a return trip through shipping, not a same-day swap.
The 3-year total-cost worksheet
Fill in your quoted hardware and colocation rate. The right column uses representative figures to show the structure; replace them with your own before deciding.
| Cost element | Your figure | Worked example (1 unit) |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware purchase | ______ | $899 (verify at apple.com) |
| Initial shipping (one way) | ______ | $125 |
| Colocation fee × 36 months | ______ | $100/mo × 36 = $3,600 |
| Remote hands (6 incidents/yr × 3 yr) | ______ | $100 × 18 = $1,800 |
| Hardware insurance (example 1.5 %/yr of purchase price) | ______ | $899 × 1.5 % × 3 ≈ $40 |
| Return shipping / decommission | ______ | $125 |
| Repair or partial replacement (contingency) | ______ | $200 |
| Colocation 3-year total | ≈ $6,789 | |
| Figment i3 rental × 36 months (request-based) | $49 × 36 = $1,764 | |
| Figment M-series rental × 36 months (from $95, request a quote) | $95 × 36 = $3,420 | |
| MacStadium M2.S × 36 months (M2, 8 GB / 256 GB) | $109 × 36 = $3,924 | |
| MacStadium M4.S × 36 months (M4, 16 GB / 256 GB) | $149 × 36 = $5,364 |
The worked single-unit colocation plan at $100/month lands near $6,789 over three years once logistics and typical remote-hands activity are included. A Figment M-series rental starting at $95/month totals $3,420 across the same period with no hardware risk, no shipping, and no repair liability — note that the $95 entry is a quoted M-series configuration, not a fixed M4/16 GB spec, so confirm your target chip and RAM in the quote. MacStadium's M4.S ($149/month, 16 GB / 256 GB, support and a 99.99% uptime target included on its pricing page) lands around $5,364, still well below the colocation scenario at one unit. If you only need an Intel toolchain, Figment's virtual Intel macOS at $29/month ($1,044 over 36 months) can run supported Xcode 26-or-earlier builds and cross-compile arm64 artifacts; see Apple's note on Intel Xcode support.
Also worth pricing. For a straight M4/16 GB/256 GB monthly rental, CloudMac lists $99.99/month and an annual plan at $999/year (effectively $83.25/month) with reservation status shown per storage tier. AWS EC2 Mac dedicated hosts are per-hour with a 24-hour minimum allocation per AWS's dedicated-hosts pricing page; the current mac-m4 host is $1.23/hour, so a 730-hour normalized month is about $897.90 before storage and network. Savings Plans and multi-year commitments change those numbers; see the AWS EC2 Mac page for the current contract options.
Where colocation starts to compete. A full 42U cabinet typically negotiates to roughly $600–$900/month in regional US facilities. Fifteen to twenty Mac minis in that cabinet cuts the per-unit rack cost to $40–$60/month, and amortized hardware across a four-year life can put the unit cost below rental — provided you already have ops staff who can file RMAs and run remote-hands tickets. Rebuild the worksheet with your fleet size before you commit.
What rental gives up, and what it removes
Removed: capital expense, depreciation, repair liability, shipping, and the data-center contract itself. Support and network sit with the provider.
Given up: no resale value at end of life, no custom hardware outside the provider's catalog, and no PCIe cards or exotic peripherals.
On hardware specs. Rental plans are catalog-based. Figment's physical i3 is $49/month and the M-series starts at $95/month; both collect requests until supply is confirmed, so treat an advertised month as the start of a conversation rather than instant stock. MacStadium publishes the full list on its pricing page with monthly prepayment as the default and annual agreements via sales. AWS prices per host-hour with on-demand, Savings Plans, and Reserved options that change the effective rate significantly over one- or three-year terms.
Two operational checks before you commit
1. Latency from where your team actually works. Open a remote-desktop or SSH session from each primary work location into a trial machine. Over 80–100 ms makes interactive coding uncomfortable, and over 150 ms it becomes a workflow tax. If you plan to colocate in another region, measure first.
2. One real build end-to-end. Register a self-hosted runner, trigger an actual build from your repository, and confirm artifact delivery. That validates the network path, runner registration, and any firewall rules on your artifact store before you sign a 36-month rack contract or a rental term. Reference GitHub's self-hosted runner hardening guide when the runner is on a shared or rented host.
Choose the Figment plan
Figment's physical Mac plans are request-based; the exact chip, RAM, and disk are confirmed in the quote. Start at /mac-hosting or request a configuration at /mac-hosting/start. If your blocker is CI work rather than hardware selection, the Managed Build Mac at $249/month includes one M-series Mac, CI setup, backups, monitoring, and 30 minutes of monthly support — a direct replacement for a colocated build server when you do not have a dedicated ops team. For two machines and two runners, Managed Mac Team is $999/month and includes one hour of monthly support.
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