Offstage Cloud rents macOS sandboxes to AI agents for $1.10 an hour

A team whose coding agent works on an iOS app has had a hard choice. A GitHub Actions macOS runner charges by the minute and rounds up. Every other hosted Mac service charges by the full day. Offstage Cloud launched this week with a different billing rule. One Mac sandbox costs $1.10 an hour and the clock stops at the second the job finishes.

The service is a product of Exla. The landing page lists the Mac as a Mac Studio M5 Max. It has 18 CPU cores and 36 GB of memory. One Mac Studio holds up to eight sandboxes at a time. A new account starts with $5 in free credit. No credit card is needed for the trial.

Xcode, the Simulator and a desktop for the agent

Each sandbox is a fresh macOS install with Xcode and the iOS Simulator ready to go. The agent can run swift test. It can open Mac apps. It can take a screenshot of its own screen. It can carry out a goal by driving its own desktop.

The quickstart for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor is one line. The user signs in, creates an API key and pastes a prompt into the agent. The prompt points the agent at https://api.offstage.cloud/SKILL.md. The agent then follows the file to set up the service. Offstage lists four open sandboxes and four running CI jobs as the current per-team cap. Extra jobs queue.

The price next to the other hosted Macs

The landing page lists the hourly rate of every public hosted Mac service, with its source. GitHub's standard macOS runner costs $3.72 an hour on an M1 with three cores. Blacksmith's M4 runner costs $4.80 an hour. Namespace's prepaid rate is $2.40 an hour with a $3.60 overage. Scaleway, AWS and Daytona rent a whole Mac mini for 24 hours. Scaleway charges $5.90 for the day. AWS charges $29.52. A Daytona macOS reservation is $60.08. The figures were checked 7 November 2026 and are the vendors' own list prices.

Offstage's own figure for a 10 minute job is $0.18. GitHub Actions is $0.62 for the same job. A Scaleway, AWS or Daytona rental is the full day. The company says GitHub rounds every job up to a full minute and offstage bills per second. Offstage has not published a matched build-speed benchmark on the same project.

The CPU is shared, and the service is new

A sandbox shares its CPU and memory with up to seven other sandboxes on the Mac Studio. The company says no CPU or memory is reserved per sandbox. A busy job on a shared Mac may run slower than a whole Mac mini on another service. A reader with a fixed long-running workload may still pay less for a 24-hour rental on Scaleway.

For CI, a developer changes one line in a GitHub Actions workflow. The runs-on field becomes offstage-macos. Each job gets a fresh sandbox. The $5 free credit covers the first jobs without an API key.

The service is new. Offstage shows no customer logos on the landing page. A team moving a real build pipeline to it should run its own test matrix first. Prices from other vendors change too, so check each source before you commit.

Source

Offstage Cloud.