Cirrus CI macOS Alternatives: Compare Runner Costs
Summary
Pixel’s announcement examines options for replacing Cirrus CI macOS jobs, comparing five vendors’ runner specifications and rates. It highlights that macOS can account for 68% to 83% of a sample monthly bill and clarifies the different shutdown timelines for Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners.
DEV Community
Cirrus CI alternative for macOS: where those jobs go
The only Cirrus CI alternative question still open is the macOS one. Cirrus CI stopped running jobs on 1 June 2026 and Cirrus Runners is closed to new customers, and while the Linux half of a Cirrus pipeline has more destinations than you need at a tenth of the price, the macOS half is where the invoice lives. The disclosure that belongs at the top rather than the bottom: Latchkey has no macOS runner at any price, so it cannot take that half from you. One month of 8,000 Linux minutes and 2,000 macOS minutes at the rates published on 2026-09-20. The macOS half is 68% to 83% of every metered bar. Two products ended on two timetables, and confusing them sends you to the wrong page. On 7 April 2026 Cirrus Labs announced it had agreed to join OpenAI as part of the Agent Infrastructure team. The same post says "Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026", which is the hosted platform that reads your .cirrus.yml. Cirrus Runners, the separate product that attaches macOS and Linux runners to GitHub Actions, is "no longer accepting new customers" and is supported "for existing customers through their existing contract periods". So a Cirrus CI user has already been cut off, and a Cirrus Runners user has until the contract ends. Either way the macOS jobs are the part worth pricing first, because GitHub lists $0.062 a minute for a 3-core or 4-core macOS runner against $0.006 for Linux 2-core x64, and rounds every job up to the whole minute on top. The step-by-step translation out of .cirrus.yml is in migrate from Cirrus CI; this page is only about where the macOS work lands. Five vendors publish a macOS runner, a shape and a rate, and the table below is all five. Their machines are not the same machine, so the vCPU and memory sit next to the price. Which Cirrus product you are actually replacing Cirrus CI was a platform: a .cirrus.yml in the repository, its own task graph, its own caches, its own artifacts. Replacing it means writing a workflow file, not changing a label, and the deadline for that has passed. Cirrus Runners is the opposite shape: ordinary GitHub Actions jobs pointed at a runner label, so replacing it is a label change and a bill comparison, on whatever timetable your contract gives you. One practical note for both: the documentation has already gone. Checked on 2026-09-20, cirrus-ci.org does not resolve and cirrus-ci.com does not answer. The only authoritative description of what your macOS tasks did is the file in your own repository, so read it before it is the thing you are trying to remember. The five published macOS destinations Ranked by the rate each vendor published on 2026-09-20, with the shape that rate buys. The shapes vary by a factor of two in cores and by more than that in memory, so the cheapest row is not automatically the cheapest job. Linux destinations, and the eight-vendor matrix behind them, are in GitHub Actions runner alternatives. Destination Published macOS shape Per minute Best for What to check first Namespace 4 vCPU, 7 GB, Apple Silicon $0.04 prepaid The cheapest published macOS minute macOS concurrency is a published vCPU ceiling of 12, 24 or 48 by plan, and overage is $0.06 GitHub-hosted macos-latest: 3-core M1, 7 GB, 14 GB SSD $0.062 Leaving without adding a third party 5 concurrent macOS jobs on Free, Pro and Team, 50 on Enterprise, shared with larger runners Blacksmith blacksmith-6vcpu-macos-latest: 6 vCPU, 24 GB, 150 GB $0.08 A Cirrus pipeline with Linux and Windows tasks too Apple Silicon M4 only, and the org needs its GitHub App installed WarpBuild M4 Pro, 6 vCPU, 14 GB $0.08 Restoring a prepared machine state per job Snapshots are metered on top: $0.04 per restore and $0.025 per hour of storage Depot depot-macos-latest: 8 CPU, 24 GB, 400 GB $0.08 The largest published macOS disk and memory Its own docs say macOS capacity is not fully elastic, so expect queue time at peak Namespace and Blacksmith both sell a larger macOS card at $0.12 and $0.16 respectively, and GitHub s...

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