ORIGINAL REDDIT POST
How you deal with VPS cost?
I am trying to build a system that needs an Mac OS VPS to build iOS apps. But it is super expensive. Is there a way to just use it only when you deploy? If yes, is there a way to avoid the long running installation part every time I need to build something?
I am trying to build a system that needs an Mac OS VPS to build iOS apps. But it is super expensive. Is there a way to just use it only when you deploy? If yes, is there a way to avoid the long running installation part every time I need to build something?
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I am trying to do an automation system and scale. I have a MacBook air and is enough for me. But of you want to code while you are shoping or driving you need something 24/7 alive or to open it for few minutes or hours but then close it. Don't know if it's possible
Tailscale and vnc resolves this while leaving your laptop at home, or you take it with you and buy a 20k mah battery that does 65+w charging so that you can go for a full day.
Yes. I think a Mac Mini is something I should get. But still expensive of you want performance . I don't mind of down time. My goal is to have an app building factory so I can have multiple mobile apps published
This I recommend, and if you have old mac mini hanging around you can add it to github action runner.
Yeah and honestly you can get an old m1 mac for about $300 and and intel one for even less (though i don't know the intel ones can still run xcode)
Thanks for the shoutout - I'm the WarpBuild founder. Here if you have any questions.
Well MacOS really is a special case. If you’re building a lot of stuff that requires it, long term it’s probably more cost effective to get one of your own
Interesting. Never thought about GitHub would have Mac os systems. I wi give it a try. Thanks for the tip
I will give it a try
Github actions bill at 6.2c/minute for a macos build environment. That should be pretty economical https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing You set up a .yml file and it'll build when you check in. You can get the same pricing on azure devops. Obviously it's not exactly self-hosted, but renting my the minute is never going to be.
This is actually a problem with the way in which Apple licenses their OS to cloud providers. If I remember correctly there is a minimum lease period for the license. Although, there are sub-lease options as well. It’s quite expensive and does require the VPS host to supply singular bare metal instances. Even AWS just has a plethora of Mac Minis in racks. Check out WarpBuild, it’s Github compatible GitHub does support MacOS, but people find it costly
I went the other way and stopped paying for one entirely. Everything I run lives on a used Mac Mini I paid $343 for, sitting on my desk. Scheduled jobs, a few small services, a local web console, up all day. Cloudflare Tunnel handles the handful of things that need to be reachable from outside, so no open ports and no static IP, and that part is free. Honest tradeoff; it's one box in my house. Power goes out, I'm down, and there's no failover. If uptime actually matters for what you're running, a VPS is the right answer. For everything else the hardware pays for itself in a few months against renting.
Why I keep seeing negative upvoting for my own comments? What I did wrong?
macincloud has a pay-as-you-go tier, like a buck an hour and you only pay while it's actually running. way cheaper than a dedicated VPS if you're not building constantly. connection can be laggy for interactive stuff but for CI-style builds where you just need it to compile and spit out an ipa it's fine, been using it for exactly that instead of owning a mac mini.