Comparison
MacDuty vs Scaleway
Comparing MacDuty and Scaleway Apple silicon for a dedicated Mac mini: the price for every configuration they sell, the 24-hour minimum both carry, when the cloud is worth paying for and when it is not.
Updated 2026-10-04
Scaleway was the first large European cloud to rent Apple silicon, and for a lot of teams it is the obvious default: you already have an account, the Mac appears next to your instances, and it answers to the same API. If that is what you need, stop reading and buy from them.
This page is for the other case: you want the machine, not the cloud around it, and you would rather not pay for the part you do not use.
The price for the same Mac
Prices checked on 4 October 2026, Scaleway's from its Apple silicon pricing page, ours from the catalog. Monthly, in euro, excluding VAT.
Every configuration Scaleway sells, next to ours:
| Mac mini | Scaleway | MacDuty, monthly | MacDuty, paid yearly |
|---|---|---|---|
| M1, 8 GB, 256 GB | 75 EUR | €65 | €52 |
| M2, 16 GB, 256 GB | 115 EUR | €89 | €71 |
| M2 Pro, 16 GB, 512 GB | 139 EUR | €119 | €95 |
| M4, 16 GB, 256 GB | 149 EUR | €109 | €87 |
| M4, 32 GB, 1 TB | 199 EUR | €134 | €107 |
| M4 Pro, 64 GB, 2 TB | 335 EUR | €244 | €195 |
| M6, 16 GB, 256 GB | not offered | €128 | €102 |
Between 13% and 33% less, on every machine they list. Paid yearly, the gap roughly doubles.
Scaleway has no M6 and no M5 Pro. If you want a 2026 Mac mini, they are not an option yet; ours are in the catalog with the date they ship.
In short
Scaleway sells macOS as cloud infrastructure: an API, a console, private networks, and a Mac that behaves like the rest of their stack. You pay for that, and if you use it, it is worth paying for.
We sell the machine. One Mac mini in our racks, yours alone, reached over SSH and screen sharing, billed by the day, the month or the year. No API, no VPC, no orchestration layer. Less product, less money.
Both of us have a 24-hour minimum, because Apple's licence terms impose one on everybody.
| Scaleway | MacDuty | |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | Mac mini M1, M2, M2 Pro, M4, M4 Pro | Mac mini M1 to M6, M4 Pro, M5 Pro |
| Billing | By the hour, 24-hour minimum | By the day, month or year, 24-hour minimum |
| Setup fee | None | None |
| Provisioning | About five minutes, by API or console | Minutes after payment for a build in stock |
| Where | Paris | Romania, EU |
| API | Yes | No |
| Restart and reinstall | From the console | From the client area, at any hour |
When Scaleway is the better choice
We would rather you pick the right host than the wrong one.
- You are already on Scaleway. One invoice, one console, one support contract, and the Mac sits inside your existing private network. That is worth real money and we cannot match it.
- You need an API more than you need a price. Scaleway creates and destroys Macs through the same API as the rest of their infrastructure. If your CI spins Macs up and down on demand, that is the product you want. We hand you a machine and you keep it.
- Latency to western Europe is critical to the millisecond. Paris is closer to Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London than Năvodari is. For Xcode builds, CI and remote desktop work the difference does not show; if you are serving users from the machine, measure it.
- You want it in five minutes, by API. Scaleway provisions in about five minutes. A build we have in stock is reachable minutes after payment too, but through the site, not a call.
When MacDuty is the better choice
- You want a 2026 Mac mini. The M6 and the M5 Pro are in our catalog. Scaleway has neither.
- The machine runs all month anyway. For the same M4, 16 GB and 256 GB, a year on Scaleway's monthly price costs 1,788 EUR; a year with us, paid yearly, is twelve times the last column of the table above. Hourly billing only saves money if the machine is actually off part of the time.
- You want to try before you commit. We bill by the day, with no setup fee and no minimum beyond Apple's 24 hours; the day price of every build is on its card. Take a machine for a day, run your build, decide.
- You want your own Apple Account and your own backups. We do not restrict what you install or where you back up. Sign in with your own Apple Account, use your own storage.
- Romania instead of France matters to you. Same EU, same GDPR, same reverse charge for a business with a VAT number. Different jurisdiction, different power grid, different supplier concentration. For some buyers that is diversification; for others it is irrelevant.
Moving from Scaleway
There is nothing to migrate in the cloud sense: a Mac mini is a Mac mini. In practice people copy their project, their signing certificates and their runner configuration, then point the CI at a new address.
- 1Take a machine from us for a day while the Scaleway one is still running.
- 2Run the same build on both, and compare the wall clock and the latency from where your team sits.
- 3If ours is slower or further than you want, you have lost the price of a coffee and learned something true. If not, move the runner and cancel the Scaleway Mac.
- Self-hosted GitHub Actions runner on a Mac mini, if you are setting one up from scratch
In stock today
These are in the rack now. Pick one, see what it comes with, and make your account only when you order.
Checking the racks
A Mac mini of your own
Pick a build. When one is not on the shelf, leave your email and we write the day it is racked.
Questions
- Is this bare metal, like Scaleway?
- Yes. One customer per Mac, no hypervisor, no shared hardware, on both sides.
- Does MacDuty have an API?
- No. If an API is what you are buying, Scaleway is the better product.
- Can I pay hourly?
- No, our smallest unit is a day. Apple's licence imposes a 24-hour minimum on hourly providers too, so in practice the granularity is the same.
- What about the newest chips?
- The M6 and the M5 Pro are in our catalog, with the date they ship. Scaleway's newest is the M4 Pro.
- Does MacDuty charge a setup fee?
- No. Neither does Scaleway.
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