An EC2 Mac alternative for Macs that run all month

How AWS bills a Mac

On AWS, the unit of billing is the Dedicated Host, not the instance. One Mac instance runs on one host. The EC2 user guide says a Mac host has a minimum allocation period of 24 hours before you can release it. The EC2 Mac product page says billing is per second after that, with the 24 hour minimum there to follow Apple's macOS license. We read both on October 1, 2026.

The practical result is simple. You pay for the host while it is allocated, whether a build is running or not. Stopping the instance does not stop the bill. Releasing the host does.

EC2 Mac prices, October 2026

These are on-demand host rates for US East (N. Virginia), as listed on instances.vantage.sh on October 1, 2026. The monthly column is the hourly rate times 730 hours.

EC2 Mac host       Chip, memory      Per hour   Full month
mac2.metal         M1, 16 GB         $0.650     $475
mac2-m2.metal      M2, 24 GB         $0.878     $641
mac-m4.metal       M4, 24 GB         $1.230     $898
mac2-m2pro.metal   M2 Pro, 32 GB     $1.560     $1,139
mac-m4pro.metal    M4 Pro, 48 GB     $1.970     $1,438

MacRun M6          M6, 16 GB         flat       $139

The Mac boots from an EBS volume, which AWS bills on top. The EC2 Mac page says a 3 year Savings Plan can cut on-demand prices by up to 44 percent. Mac hosts are not sold as Spot or Reserved Instances, according to the user guide.

When AWS is the better choice

• You need a Mac for a day or two, then not again for weeks. A 24 hour host costs far less than any monthly plan.
• Your pipeline already lives in AWS. Mac instances run in your VPC and boot from EBS volumes, like other EC2 instances. The user guide says they also support EC2 Auto Scaling.
• You need more than one region. Vantage listed mac-m4.metal in six AWS regions across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. MacRun has one location, in New Jersey.
• You need a very large Mac. The EC2 Mac page lists an M4 Max with 128 GB and an M3 Ultra with 256 GB. Our largest is an M5 Pro with 64 GB, sold as a pre-order.
• Procurement only approves AWS spend. That is a real constraint, and EC2 Mac is the clean answer to it.

A worked example: a Mac every weekday

Say your team needs a Mac for builds every weekday. You might plan to release the host each evening and allocate a new one each morning. That saves nothing. Each allocation bills at least 24 hours, so a host released at 6 pm costs the same as one kept overnight.

The cheaper pattern is to hold the host from Monday morning to Friday evening. That is about 104 hours a week. At the mac2.metal rate, it comes to about $68 a week, or about $293 a month. On mac-m4.metal, the same pattern is about $554 a month. You save the weekends. You also script the allocation and release, and each Monday starts with a fresh launch.

A MacRun Mac costs $139 a month and stays on all the time, weekends included. There is nothing to allocate or release.

When a monthly Mac mini is the better choice

The break-even point comes early. At $0.65 an hour, 214 hours of mac2.metal cost the same as one month of MacRun. That is about 9 days. Past that, every hour on the monthly Mac is free. A CI runner waits for pushes all day. An AI coding agent works overnight. Either way, the host would sit allocated all month.

Setup is the other difference. AWS says a Mac instance launches in about 6 to 20 minutes from its own macOS image. You then install Xcode, simulator runtimes and your CI agent. A MacRun Mac arrives with Xcode 26.6 opened once, the iOS 26.5 simulator runtime, and the GitHub Actions runner software installed. It is ready 1 to 4 hours after payment.

Speed is measured, not claimed. We built the Wikipedia iOS app with Xcode 26.6, median of 3 runs. A clean build took 86 seconds on our M6 and 183 seconds on a GitHub-hosted macos-26 runner. The full method is in the benchmark post. We have not benchmarked EC2 Mac hosts ourselves.

There is also an agent plan. For $169 a month, the Mac comes with Claude Code and Codex installed. You sign in with your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. The desktop opens in a browser tab, and the agent session survives reboots.

What MacRun does not offer

• No hourly billing. Plans are monthly, cancel anytime.
• No public or static IP. You reach the Mac over a private Tailscale network.
• No SLA, and one location only.
• No Mac Studio or Mac Pro hardware.

If those matter more than price, stay on EC2 Mac. If your Mac runs most of the month, compare the numbers on our pricing page. You can also read how a self-hosted macOS runner works.