Figment vs Casbay: Mac Hosting Compared in 2026

Direct verdict: if you want the lowest monthly entry price for an Apple silicon Mac and are willing to confirm the exact chip, RAM and disk at quote, request Figment's M-series from $95/month at /mac-hosting/start. If you specifically need a confirmed M4 / 16 GB / 256 GB Mac mini in Malaysia on bare metal with a published 99.9% uptime SLA and 24/7 support, Casbay is the known quantity at $149/month monthly, $129/month on a 6-month term, or $109/month on a 12-month prepay ($1,308 upfront) per Casbay's Rent a Mac page. The monthly entry-price gap is $54, but Casbay's spec is fixed while Figment's $95 is the entry price with the exact M-series chip, RAM and disk confirmed at quote.

What Casbay Publishes

Casbay's Rent a Mac page lists one Mac hosting product: an Apple M4 Mac mini with 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 256 GB NVMe SSD, 100 Mbps unmetered bandwidth, and one dedicated IPv4 address. The machine is in Malaysia, is a dedicated bare-metal Mac mini (one customer per Mac), and provides full administrator access via DeskIn, Screen Sharing, or SSH.

Published pricing:

Casbay publishes a 99.9% uptime SLA and 24/7 technical support. Provisioning is stated as 12 to 24 business hours. No setup fee is listed. No refunds are offered; cancellation stops future billing only. Any tax or fees are as stated in Casbay's checkout.

What Figment Publishes

Physical i3 and M-series plans are request-based while supply is confirmed. Figment does not publish an uptime SLA, trial, benchmark or provisioning window; request a configuration quote or an evaluation before purchase at /mac-hosting/start.

12-Month Cost Comparison

On Casbay's best published rate ($109/month on a 12-month prepay, $1,308 upfront), Figment's $95/month rolling monthly totals $1,140 over 12 months — $168 less, with no upfront commitment. This is an entry-price comparison. Figment's exact M-series chip generation, RAM and disk are confirmed at quote, so this is not a like-for-like "M4 vs M4" statement; if a confirmed M4 / 16 GB / 256 GB is a hard requirement today, Casbay is the fixed spec. Over 6 months, Figment at $95 totals $570 versus Casbay's $774 prepay — a $204 difference at entry price only.

Hardware, Access, and Toolchain Fit

Casbay publishes full administrator (root) access on its M4 Mac mini. Figment's M-series access level is confirmed at quote; put the specifics your CI needs — sudo, trusted CAs, xcode-select --switch, custom kexts — into your request.

Casbay's $109–$149 machine is a confirmed M4 / 16 GB / 256 GB. Figment's $95 is the entry monthly price for an M-series Mac; chip, RAM and disk are set in the quote and should not be assumed equivalent before that step.

Exact Xcode releases have specific macOS minimums, so do not treat the 26.x line as one requirement. Check the Xcode row you plan to use against Apple's Xcode system requirements before ordering. visionOS development requires Apple silicon per that page. Figment's $29 virtual Intel macOS VM is a real macOS environment and can run compatible Intel Mac toolchains, including supported Xcode 26-or-earlier versions; it has no GPU acceleration and no audio, and it cannot execute ARM-only binaries. Xcode 27 does not run on Intel. Choose Figment's M-series (or Casbay's M4) for ARM execution, Metal-GPU work, or Apple silicon App Store submissions.

Location matters for latency: Casbay is in Malaysia with 100 Mbps unmetered bandwidth — a concrete fit for teams and artifact stores in Southeast Asia or Asia-Pacific. Confirm the Figment data-center region for your team at /mac-hosting before switching.

A Build Test You Can Actually Run

Casbay publishes 100 Mbps unmetered bandwidth; Figment's network specs are confirmed at quote. Build speed depends on CPU, thermals, storage I/O and network — not just chip model. Use your own repo on each machine and compare wall-clock times. This is an unexecuted example, not a benchmark we ran:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# compare-builds.sh — run on each candidate machine, compare wall-clock times
set -euo pipefail                      # abort on error; a failed build is not a fast build

REPO_URL="$YOUR_REPO_URL"
SCHEME="$YOUR_SCHEME"                  # taken from: xcodebuild -list
DEST="$YOUR_DESTINATION"               # e.g. "platform=macOS" or a real iOS Simulator destination

DIR="$(mktemp -d)"
trap 'rm -rf "$DIR"' EXIT
git clone --depth 1 "$REPO_URL" "$DIR"
cd "$DIR"

echo "=== Clean build timing ==="
time xcodebuild clean build \
  -scheme "$SCHEME" \
  -destination "$DEST" \
  CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO

echo "=== Disk write (512 MiB) ==="
time dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=1m count=512
rm ./testfile

echo "=== CPU and memory ==="
sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu hw.physicalcpu hw.memsize

Provisioning on Casbay is stated as 12 to 24 business hours; Figment availability is confirmed at quote. Agree an evaluation step before paying a long term.

Casbay-to-Figment Migration Checklist

Specific to Casbay's setup (DeskIn/Screen Sharing/SSH remote access, Malaysia data center, monthly or prepaid billing):

• Confirm Figment M-series availability. Submit /mac-hosting/start and get a confirmed hardware spec and provisioning date before cancelling Casbay.
• Check Casbay billing cycle. Note the next renewal in the Casbay portal. Casbay publishes no-refund, cancel-to-stop-future-billing terms.
• Capture Homebrew state. brew bundle dump --file=Brewfile on the Casbay machine.
• Capture Ruby/Fastlane state. Keep Gemfile, Gemfile.lock, fastlane/Fastfile, Appfile, Matchfile in git. Do not export the full shell environment to a plaintext file — list the required secret names separately and restore values through your secret manager on the new host.
• Export signing certificates with their private keys from Keychain Access as an encrypted .p12. Provisioning profiles are files under ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles/ — copy them directly, do not try to import them into Keychain.
• Update your own allowlists. Rotate any customer-controlled firewall, artifact-store or CI-service allowlists that pinned the Casbay IP. We are not relying on a public App Store Connect or TestFlight IP allowlist.
• Reprovision on Figment. brew bundle install --file=Brewfile; bundle install; install the Xcode version matched to your target OS; import the .p12 with its private key; replace provisioning profiles in the directory above.
• Run your real project build with compare-builds.sh and verify Fastlane lanes end-to-end before cutover.
• Cancel Casbay through the portal before the next billing date; keep the confirmation.

Choosing Your Figment Plan

Start your request at /mac-hosting/start and confirm hardware, region and availability in the quote.

Related reading:

• Figment vs CloudMac: Mac Hosting Compared
• Figment vs Datagram: Mac Hosting Compared
• VM vs Dedicated Mac: Which Should You Rent?