The Scaleway alternative for a US Mac mini by the day or the month

Scaleway is a cloud provider first. It sells compute instances, GPUs, containers, object and block storage, bare metal and Apple silicon, and describes itself as a European alternative to hyperscalers, with three availability zones in each of its regions. The Mac mini is one line in that catalogue, not the business.

That shapes how its Macs are sold. They launch from the same console as a cloud instance, run on the same meter and join the same private networks. If you already run on Scaleway, a Mac there is one more resource in a project you know.

ResiFactory is the other way round: a proxy company that also rents dedicated Mac minis, with the Mac beside your proxies in one dashboard rather than inside a cloud. We have no instances, storage or private network to attach it to.

Scaleway prices its Macs by the hour, with a monthly price listed beside each build. Its M4 entry build is €0.22 an hour or €149 a month for the M4-S, an M4 with 16 GB and a 256 GB SSD. Run that rate across a whole day and the total is a fraction of what we charge for a day of an M4. On price by the day, Scaleway wins, and it is not close.

By the month we are much nearer. Our cheapest build starts at $160 a month in dollars, against Scaleway's monthly figure in euros, so the exchange rate and your tax position decide which is cheaper.

Below the M4, Scaleway has no competition from us at all. Its entry build is €0.11 an hour or €75 a month for the M1-M, an M1 with 8 GB of memory. We do not rent an M1 or an M2, so if an older chip does the job, Scaleway is the cheaper way to get one.

Our flat price buys a number that does not move: a day rental from $32, 24 hours counted from when the Mac is ready, with no meter to watch.

Scaleway's Macs carry a 24-hour minimum lease, a licence constraint; a Mac mini can only be deleted after it. Scaleway puts it down to licensing. Our own shortest rental is a day too, so on this point the two of us are level. On Scaleway it means a test that needs one hour still pays for a full day.

The part worth reading twice is the other end. A Scaleway Mac is billed for as long as the Mac mini is assigned to the account, in use or not, until it is deleted. There is a console setting that deletes the Mac mini automatically once the 24 hours are up, which helps, but a machine left running after a project ends keeps costing money.

Our rentals end on their own. You pay for a day or a month up front, we message you before the end with an extend button, and a day rental is wiped unless you extend it. A forgotten machine costs nothing beyond the period you bought.

One exception on their side: Scaleway lists no minimum commitment on a Mac mini installed with Asahi Linux. If you want Apple silicon running Linux, that is a flexibility we do not offer.

Scaleway's range is Mac mini M1, M2, M2 Pro, M4 and M4 Pro. That is a wider spread than ours, from an older chip at the bottom to €0.49 an hour or €335 a month for the M4-XL, an M4 Pro with 64 GB of memory at the top. If your work needs a large memory pool, for local models or heavy builds, its top build goes further than anything we rent.

Its network is 1 Gbps on every build, up to 10 Gbps on the M4-M and M4-XL. Each machine gets one IPv4 address and one IPv6 /128 per Mac mini and comes with the latest compatible Xcode, MacPorts, fail2ban for VNC filtering, and its own scw-agent. The FAQ is clear about the limits too: no access to macOS recovery, and System Integrity Protection cannot be turned off.

Our builds are the base configuration of each chip, on 1 or 2.5 Gbps lines, and the plan table further down lists each one with its memory and today's stock. We sell no older chip and no large memory option, so if you need either, Scaleway is the better fit.

Scaleway runs four European regions: Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. Its Macs are hosted in its European datacenter in Paris, France, and the region table shows Paris only; no Mac mini is offered in Amsterdam, Warsaw or Milan. For a European team, a European customer base or a European data rule, that is exactly where you want the machine.

Ours are in US colocation. That matters when the services you test or the users you serve are in North America: a remote desktop across the Atlantic works, but every click carries the round trip.

So region is the cleanest way to choose: European work belongs on Scaleway's Paris machines, American work on ours.

Scaleway describes each Mac as a dedicated machine with no hypervisor, available in less than 5 minutes. You launch it from the console and connect by VNC remote desktop or SSH. For a developer who wants a blank machine and a shell, that is hard to beat.

We do not publish a minutes figure for setup, so we will not invent one. We count your time from when the Mac is ready, not from when you pay, so setup time is ours. The login sits in your dashboard, with a remote desktop from Windows, Mac or Linux.

This is Scaleway's strongest ground. A Scaleway Mac can join a Private Network for Apple silicon from €9.99 a month at up to 1 Gbps, is integrated with Scaleway's Software Development Kit, and its FAQ suggests backups with a tool of your choice, such as Restic or Arq, stored on its Object Storage.

If your build pipeline already lives in Scaleway, those integrations are worth more than any price difference on this page. A Mac on the same private network as your build servers, managed with the same tools, is simpler than one reached over the internet.

Our Macs are standalone, reached over the internet with their own login. Our version of integration is smaller: one dashboard, one bill and one support channel for your Macs and your proxies.

Every build we rent is a whole Mac mini, single-tenant and on bare metal, from $32 a day or $160 a month. The table below is read live from our catalogue, so it shows stock and price as of this page load, with out-of-stock builds marked rather than hidden.

Scaleway sells no proxies, and it would be odd if it did. We mention them because many of the people who rent a Mac from us also route its traffic through a residential or mobile exit, and it helps to buy both in one place.

Essential is $1.50/GB and Premium is $3.00/GB, both rotating per request, and Premium and Mobile hold a sticky session for up to 24 hours (120 minutes on Essential). Mobile is $3.00/GB, on real phones attached to carrier networks. See residential proxies for the detail.

Choose Scaleway for the cheapest Mac by the day, a Mac in Europe, an older chip, a large memory build, or a Mac inside a cloud you already use. It is cheaper by the day, it is in Paris, and its cloud integrations are real.

Choose us for a Mac in the US, a flat day or month price with no meter, a rental that ends on its own, and proxies on the same sign-in. It is a smaller catalogue than Scaleway's, built for that job.

Scaleway's own Apple silicon FAQ is the most useful thing to read before you rent. It is specific about the minimum lease, billing and the limits of a hosted Mac, and every point we took from it links back to the page.

We would rather you judged us on the machines than on a badge. Every ResiFactory price here is read live from our catalogue, and the trust page lists what we can prove rather than what we claim.