Figment vs Roundfleet: Mac Hosting Compared

Verdict: hourly for burst, Figment for always-on and managed CI

Both providers price in USD. Roundfleet's base M4 Mac mini is $99/month flat or $0.14/hour on a 10 Gbps port (roundfleet.com/pricing). Figment M-series starts at $95/month and, for Intel toolchains, a virtual Intel macOS VM runs at $29/month (2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 80 GiB disk).

• If your Mac runs always-on, Figment M-series undercuts the $99 flat line by $4/month ($48/year) and, at the Managed Build Mac tier, replaces engineer time spent wiring CI.
• If your Mac only wakes for nightly or weekly jobs, Roundfleet's hourly meter is structurally cheaper than any flat plan either vendor publishes.
• If your builds are Intel-compatible (Xcode 26 or earlier targeting iOS/macOS without Apple-silicon-only dependencies), Figment's $29 Intel macOS VM is the lowest entry price in the comparison. It is a real macOS environment that runs compatible Intel Mac toolchains. It has no GPU acceleration, no audio, and cannot run Apple-silicon-only binaries or visionOS SDKs.

Request a Figment configuration at /mac-hosting/start.

Published plans, terms and effective cost

Roundfleet's pricing page does not publish an annual-prepayment discount, setup fee, uptime SLA or minimum term (roundfleet.com/pricing, checked Nov 2026). Taxes and fees apply as stated in the actual Roundfleet checkout. Figment's physical M-series and i3 ($49) offers collect requests until supply is confirmed; the $29 VM capacity is also under verification. No free trial is offered on either side; Figment will quote and agree an evaluation before purchase.

Hourly vs flat rate: a worked breakeven

Use this to decide the model for one machine, not the hardware class.

Breakeven hours/month = flat rate ÷ hourly rate.

For the M4-S: $99 ÷ $0.14 = 707.14 hours/month (≈23.57 hours/day).

At Roundfleet's own $99 line, the hourly meter wins until you exceed ~707 hours per month. Against Figment M-series at $95/month, the breakeven moves slightly: $95 ÷ $0.14 = 678.57 hours. Hourly is still the right call for burst work; flat wins for pipelines that sit idle but on.

If your usage is well below the breakeven, Roundfleet hourly is the honest recommendation. If it is above, Figment M-series at $95/month saves $48/year and the Managed Build Mac at $249/month adds CI setup, backups, monitoring and 30 minutes of monthly support — work your team otherwise pays an engineer to do on a bare Roundfleet machine.

Hardware, access and toolchain fit

Roundfleet ships M4 and M4 Pro mini configurations with 10 Gbps port speed and SSD expansion to 2 TB on both tiers. That port speed helps CI that pulls large simulator runtimes or pushes multi-gigabyte artifacts; port speed is not end-to-end throughput, so measure against the actual far end you use.

Figment M-series hardware is quoted per order; the "from $95" headline is an entry price, not a verified M4/16/256 configuration. When comparing to Roundfleet's $99 M4-S, treat it as entry-cost parity and confirm the exact chip, RAM and disk in the Figment quote before you commit.

Xcode and macOS. Per Apple's current system requirements, Xcode 27 (including 27.1, 27.2 and 27.3 beta) requires macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later. Xcode 26.4.1, 26.5 and 26.6 require Tahoe 26.2 or later; 26.0–26.3 run on Sequoia 15.6 through Tahoe. Intel Macs cannot run Xcode 27. Xcode 26 and earlier include Intel-compatible toolchains, and many iOS simulator runtimes still ship Intel slices — check the exact Xcode/macOS pair you plan to run. visionOS development requires Apple silicon. For ARM-only execution, Metal GPU work, or visionOS, choose Figment M-series or any Roundfleet M4/M6 tier; for Intel iOS/macOS builds, the Figment $29 VM is sufficient.

A short buyer test (unexecuted example)

Run the same measurement on each candidate machine and compare wall-clock numbers. This is an example, not a benchmark we ran.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

PROJECT="${PROJECT:?set to your .xcodeproj or .xcworkspace}"
SCHEME="${SCHEME:?confirm via: xcodebuild -list -project $PROJECT}"
ARTIFACT_URL="${ARTIFACT_URL:?a large file your account is entitled to download}"

# 1. Network: measure a real authenticated download you actually use.
time curl -fL -o /tmp/net.bin "$ARTIFACT_URL"

# 2. Cold build on your own project.
xcodebuild -list -project "$PROJECT"
time xcodebuild clean build \
  -project "$PROJECT" \
  -scheme "$SCHEME" \
  -destination 'generic/platform=iOS'

# 3. Local disk: sustained write with fsync.
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1m count=500 of=/tmp/disk.bin conv=fsync

set -euo pipefail stops on the first failure, so a failed build is never counted as a fast run. Use your own repository and scheme; do not invent either.

Roundfleet-to-Figment switch plan

Capture state on the Roundfleet machine:

• Record xcodebuild -version and sw_vers.
• Export Homebrew lists: brew list --formula > brew-formulas.txt, brew list --cask > brew-casks.txt.
• Export signing identities with private keys from Keychain Access → My Certificates as encrypted .p12.
• Copy provisioning profile files from ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles/ — these are files on disk, not Keychain exports.
• Transfer the names of required CI secrets, then restore values through your own secret manager. Do not dump the shell environment to a plaintext file; it can contain private keys and tokens.
• Save CI runner tokens (GitHub Actions self-hosted, Buildkite, CircleCI resource class) so you can re-register the new host.
• Run a baseline cold build and log wall-clock time.

Provision Figment and cut over:

• Request the Figment Mac at /mac-hosting/start; confirm chip, RAM and disk in the quote.
• Replay Homebrew: xargs brew install < brew-formulas.txt, then the casks.
• Import the signing identity: security import YourCert.p12 -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db.
• Restore provisioning profiles into ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles/.
• Install the Xcode version matching your build matrix.
• Register the CI runner on the new host; deregister it on Roundfleet.
• Update the IP allowlists you actually manage — your artifact store, your CI platform, your VPN — to the new egress. There is no public App Store Connect or TestFlight allowlist to update.
• Re-run the baseline build and compare numbers before you stop paying for Roundfleet.
• Stop the Roundfleet machine; on hourly billing, idle machines keep accruing until deallocated.

Choose the Figment plan

Start a quote at /mac-hosting/start. Overview: /mac-hosting.

Also see: Figment vs OakHost · Figment vs Agent.Space · CI Minutes or Dedicated Mac?