Would you rent a Mac Mini instead of buying one?
I'm building WestCoastMacs — bare-metal Apple Silicon Mac Minis you rent by the day/week/month instead of buying, hosted in a Sacramento datacenter. Aimed at freelance iOS/macOS devs and small teams who need real Apple hardware (not a VM) for CI, App Store builds, or a short project, without dropping $1,000+ on a machine that sits idle half the time.
Still pre-launch — right now it's a pricing/interest survey, no live service yet. One thing I'm genuinely unsure about: would a "hibernate" option appeal to you — pay a small monthly fee to keep your whole dev environment (apps, projects, settings) frozen and ready, instead of paying full rental price while you're not actively using it?
Would love blunt feedback: is this something you'd actually pay for, and what would "worth it" pricing look like for you? https://westcoastmacs.com/
Keeping the setup between projects sounds useful. Whether I could also count on a machine being available when I returned would make a difference to what I'd pay.
The “hibernate option makes sense, but I’d test it as a separate plan rather than assuming people will switch between rental and storage. A simple landing page with three concrete scenarios — short CI burst, one-month project, and dormant-but-ready — could reveal which job actually drives demand. Id also ask early users what would make them trust a remote physical machine with their code and signing credentials, since that may matter as much as the price.