Pricing the three routes to shipping iOS without a Mac, honestly

A developer writing on dev.to has published a cost breakdown of the three ways to build and sign an iOS app without owning a Mac, based on hitting the wall on their own project ^[0]. It is worth reading as an arithmetic exercise, because the constraint at the top is not negotiable: Apple requires the app be built and signed with Xcode, Xcode runs only on macOS, and that holds whether you wrote it in Swift, React Native, Capacitor or Flutter ^[1][2].

Route one is buying the hardware. A Mac mini starts around $799 after Apple raised the entry price in 2026, and that is a one-time cost for a machine you own and can use for other work ^[3]. The author's own caveat is the honest one: it makes no sense for a side project, a one-off, or an idea you have not yet made a dollar from ^[4].

Route two is renting. MacStadium, MacinCloud and similar services sell remote access to real Macs by the hour or month, running from about $20/month for a shared, lower-spec box to $100/month and up for dedicated hardware ^[5]. Put those numbers against the mini and the break-even is stark: roughly 40 months at $20, roughly 8 months at $100 ^[1]. On a side project, eight months is one delayed launch. The other problem is shape, not price. These services are built around interactive use, where you remote into a desktop and click ^[6]. A release cut takes minutes; a month of rented desktop is mostly unused capacity.

Route three is GitHub Actions. Its macOS runners are free on public repositories ^[7], and although they are marketed for test suites, a macOS runner is a macOS machine with Xcode's command-line tools, capable of running the same xcodebuild commands that sign, archive and export ^[8]. The author's pipeline is a push to main, a runner spun up, certificate and profile installed from secrets, xcodebuild archive and export, then upload to App Store Connect and TestFlight ^[9]. Credentials live in encrypted GitHub secrets and are not exposed in the repo or build logs; repo visibility affects minute pricing only ^[12].

Private repos change the bill, not the mechanism: a monthly free allowance, then per-minute charges, with macOS minutes at roughly 10x standard Linux minutes, which the author says is usually still cheaper than renting ^[10][11]. And every route pays Apple's $99/year Developer Program fee regardless ^[13]. First-year cash, then: about $898 to buy, $339 to rent at the cheap tier, $99 on a public repo ^[2].

The cost the pricing table misses is signing. Regenerate a certificate without regenerating every provisioning profile built against it and builds fail with errors that do not explain themselves ^[14]. Profile names and bundle IDs must match character for character, case and whitespace included ^[15]. Worst is the silent one: reupload with a marketing version and build number you have already used and App Store Connect rejects it while the upload tool reports success, so CI shows green and TestFlight shows nothing ^[16].

Watch that last failure mode first, because it is the one that costs a day rather than a dollar. Then watch your private-repo minute allowance, which is the only variable standing between $99 a year and a bill.