Before you rent a cloud Mac, here's what you probably want to know

Billing starts the moment your credentials are issued, with each billing cycle running 24 hours; any partial day is rounded up to a full day. So if you power on at 8 PM Tuesday and terminate before 8 PM Wednesday, you're only charged for one day. Think of it like a taxi fare: within that first block you're not charged extra, but crossing into a new full day starts the next unit.

Four billing cycles are available: daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Take our entry-level Zest M4 (M4 / 16GB / 256GB) as an example: $21.6/day, or $108.1/month — the monthly rate works out to roughly $3.6/day, which is a solid discount for longer-term use. See exact pricing on the plans page.

Auto-renew is off by default; you can turn it on per instance from the dashboard. Once enabled, the system attempts to charge your account balance 24 hours before expiry and emails you either way — including a heads-up if the charge fails, so nothing goes down silently.

An instance that isn't renewed isn't reclaimed right away: after expiry it's stopped and held for 72 hours with all data intact, and you can top up and resume anytime during that window. Only after the grace period expires does it enter the wipe process. We see plenty of people miss a renewal mid-project — that 72-hour buffer is there for exactly that.

You can upgrade anytime: unused time is converted to account balance at your original rate and applied toward the new plan, so you only pay the difference — no double billing. Since it's a hardware swap, upgrading means migrating your data to a new machine; we recommend taking a snapshot first, and the whole process usually finishes within 30 minutes.

Switching billing cycles works the same way — say you've been on daily billing for 5 days and decide it's time to go monthly; the daily amount already paid is credited toward the monthly rate. Downgrades take effect at the end of the current cycle, with no refund or extra charge for the current period, which keeps people from cycling plans back and forth to game the pricing.

Every order maps to one physical Mac mini — not a VM slice, and not shared CPU, memory, or disk with anyone else. You get root access to a full macOS install, free to reimage, tune kernel parameters, or run virtualization software yourself.

Easy to verify: log in and run system_profiler SPHardwareDataType, and you'll see the actual Mac mini serial number and chip model — not something a VM can fake. Build performance matches an equivalent local Mac one-to-one, with zero virtualization overhead.

At checkout you can pick any current mainstream release: various point releases of macOS Sonoma (14) and Sequoia (15), with the latest stable version deployed by default. M4-series machines are limited by Apple's own hardware support window, so you can't install anything older than the factory-shipped OS — worth keeping in mind when choosing a version.

Betas are fair game: it's your dedicated machine, so once you have root, just enroll in the Apple Beta Software Program and upgrade yourself. Want to jump back to stable afterward? Use the free reimage option in the dashboard for a clean reset in about 20 minutes. For multi-version compatibility testing, the easier path is spinning up two or three daily instances in parallel, each running a different version, then terminating them once you're done.

Yes — and honestly, this is one of the top reasons people rent a cloud Mac in the first place. macOS natively supports multiple Xcode installs side by side: drop each version into /Applications under a distinct name (e.g., Xcode_15.4.app, Xcode_16.2.app), then switch between them with xcode-select -s or the DEVELOPER_DIR environment variable — and CI scripts can target a specific version per project the same way.

The one thing to watch is disk space: each unpacked Xcode install runs 30GB+, and with simulator runtimes added on top, two versions can get tight on the entry-level 256GB tier. If you know you'll need multiple versions, go with a Citrus M4 (512GB and up) or higher tier from the start.

All three regions — Tokyo (JP), Singapore (SG), and US West (US-W) — run on a shared 1Gbps uplink with unmetered bandwidth. In practice, downloads from Apple's servers and mainstream package registries typically hit several hundred Mbps, so a multi-gigabyte Xcode installer usually lands in under ten minutes — faster than most home broadband connections.

Latency from your location to the machine depends on distance. As a rough guide: East Asia to Tokyo is typically 35–60ms, to Singapore around 70ms, and to US West around 130–160ms — actual results will vary. Coding over SSH is fairly latency-tolerant; if you'll be doing extended VNC/GUI work, pick the region closest to you.

Yes — every instance gets its own dedicated public IPv4 address, fixed for the life of the rental, included at no extra cost on every plan. SSH (22) and VNC (5900) are open by default and protected by firewall allowlisting; you can open any other port yourself from the dashboard — for example, opening an HTTP port for a TestFlight distribution tool or a self-hosted service.

A dedicated IP also has a practical upside: registering a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner or working with Apple Developer services won't run into false-positive flags that shared exit IPs sometimes trigger.

Yes, via "snapshot and restore in a new region": take a full snapshot of your current machine, spin up a new one of the same or higher tier in the target region, then restore from the snapshot. Data transfers over our internal network, usually finishing in 1–2 hours, with the original machine staying fully usable the whole time. Once the switch is done, terminate the old instance and any unused time is refunded to your balance.

Two things to keep in mind: the target region needs to have stock for the machine tier you want (for example, Blaze M4 Pro is only available in JP and US-W), and your public IP will change with the region — remember to update the machine address in your CI config after migrating.

About 2 minutes after payment goes through, your SSH and VNC credentials appear on the instance's detail page in the dashboard — displayed over HTTPS the whole time, never sent by email in plain text (email only carries a "your machine is ready" notification, no password included). The initial password is randomly generated and single-use; you'll be prompted to change it immediately on first login, though we'd recommend just uploading your SSH public key from the dashboard and disabling password login entirely.

Physical isolation is about as complete as it gets: your data lives only on the local SSD of the one Mac mini you have exclusive access to — no shared storage with any other user — and we never read or back up any files on your machine (so please handle your own snapshots or off-site backups for anything important).

After termination (including once the 72-hour post-expiry grace period runs out), the machine enters a standard wipe process: we use Apple Silicon's hardware encryption to destroy the full-disk encryption keys and reset the system, making the original data cryptographically unrecoverable — only then does the machine go back into the available pool. This process runs identically on every terminated machine, no exceptions.

Yes, and we recommend turning it on. You can link a TOTP authenticator (your phone's built-in password manager or any TOTP-compatible app works) to your dashboard account; once enabled, login and sensitive actions — reimaging, terminating, changing credentials — all require a second factor.

Teams don't need to share the main account: you can create sub-accounts and assign permissions per instance — who can view credentials, who can reimage, who can only see billing — and revoking access for someone who's left is as simple as deactivating their sub-account.

Yes. Every account's first instance gets a 24-hour no-questions refund window starting from delivery: request termination in the dashboard within that window and get a full refund of what you paid, no explanation needed. That's plenty of time to run a full build and test latency to your location before deciding if the machine fits.

Outside that window, regular terminations on weekly/monthly/quarterly plans are pro-rated at the equivalent daily rate for time used, with the remainder credited back to your balance; daily-billing orders aren't refunded for the current day already billed. The no-questions window only applies to an account's first order, to keep it from being gamed with repeat open-and-cancel cycles that tie up inventory.

We commit to 99.9% monthly uptime per instance, with every region running 365 days a year around the clock — so the uptime calculation has no built-in exclusions. If our platform is at fault (hardware failure, network outage in the data center) and you can't reach your machine, you get a credit equal to 20% of your daily rate for every full hour of confirmed downtime, capped at 100% of that instance's fees paid for the current month.

For example: a Citrus M4 on the $198.2/month plan works out to roughly $6.60/day, so a 3-hour platform-side outage earns about $4 in credit. Downtime caused by your own actions (misconfigured networking, deleted system files) or force majeure events isn't covered — see our Terms of Service for the exact definitions. To request a credit, just open a support ticket with the outage timeframe and we'll verify it against our monitoring logs.