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points by solatic 4 days ago | 0 comments
The cost of cloud Mac hardware is quite frankly ludicrous across the board. Namespace's minimum for an M6 is, what, $0.06/minute for 6 vCPU? And that's on the cheap end - Semaphore wants $0.09/minute for 4 vCPU and GitHub Actions wants $0.062/minute for M1 hardware (forget AWS pricing even which is even more atrocious).

If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?

Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?

[–] GeekyBear 4 days ago
> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.

When you take resale value into account, purchase makes even more sense than renting.

Used M1 Mac Minis from 2020 are currently selling for about $500 when they originally retailed for $699.

[–] MonkeyClub 4 days ago
> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.

The clue to their decision may be right there, potentially going for an increase in sales.

But nowadays it seems they suffer from a lack of vision and drive; perhaps (hopefully) they’ll come around.

[–] robin_reala 4 days ago
I have a test suite that needs to run on a Mac in a project that merges < 20 PRs a year. No point in provisioning our own Mac and maintaining it for that.
[–] wereHamster 4 days ago
I looked at our GitHub Actions monthly expenses, then at the price of a M4 Mac mini (just when they were released, and still cheap), and decided to buy one as it would pay for itself in less than a year. There are definitely still cases when buying hardware still makes sense, over renting in the cloud.
[–] mike_hearn 4 days ago
Yep. I run a local CI cluster of Macs made up of old laptops, so the effective cost is "zero" (resale would be annoying and I probably wouldn't bother). It's pretty easy. No way am I paying those kinds of rates for cloud Macs.
[–] ghboo0927 4 days ago
the problem of buying machine is that it doesn't scale. you have to buy another one if the test gets heavier.
[–] solatic 4 days ago
Mac Minis are small and power efficient. Scaling questions are always a question of degree. Several Mac Minis, Ethernet cabling, a KVM switch, maybe a simple MDM to make your life a little easier, scales just fine.
[–] garymiklos 4 days ago
NoMac is just $0.015/min or $0.90/h, it is the cheapest one.