Offstage Cloud

At a glance

Offstage Cloud, a beta service from Exla, rents a real Mac to code or a coding agent over an API. A sandbox is a macOS 27 user account on a Mac Studio M5 Max with Xcode 27.2 and Swift, driven one command or file at a time. A task clones a public repository, runs one command and keeps named artifacts. It can also serve as a GitHub Actions runner.

Good fit

Developers whose agent runs on Linux or in the cloud but needs macOS for Swift builds, swift test or xcodebuild, or who want a short macOS CI job without renting a Mac for a whole day. Per-second billing suits jobs measured in minutes. The docs give a 10-minute run at about $0.18.

Consider something else when

You need to drive a desktop app, take screenshots or run the agent-driven GUI mode: that access is paused for public accounts. Skip it too if you need sudo or Homebrew, guaranteed CPU and memory, or more than four sandboxes at once. A Mac kept busy all day may cost less as a whole-day rental, the site itself notes.

Start here

Sign up and create a key under API keys in the console; it starts with sk_offstage_ and is shown once. Install the SDK from the versioned tarball (npm install https://api.offstage.cloud/sdk/offstage-cloud-0.3.1.tgz), since the npm registry copy is older. Create a sandbox, run sw_vers -productVersion, and kill it in a finally block. For CI, connect GitHub in the console and set runs-on: offstage-macos.

Cost and requirements

$1.10 an hour per sandbox, task or CI job, billed per second with no minimum; queue time is free. New personal accounts get $5 credit with no card, once per person. Paid top-ups were not open on 7 November 2026, so more credit means emailing the team. The SDK needs Node 18+, Bun or Deno; a standard-library Python helper also exists.

Limits to know

Up to eight sandboxes share one Mac Studio with no fixed CPU or memory per sandbox, so build times vary. A sandbox lives one hour by default, at most 24, and closes after 10 idle minutes; CI jobs stop at 60 minutes. Tasks take only a public repo's default branch. The docs say a full iOS Simulator xcodebuild test run is unverified. Files are deleted when a sandbox ends.

Related work

• Offscreen: throwaway macOS virtual machines for UI tests, the iOS Simulator and GUI apps, the work Offstage's public accounts cannot currently run (alternative)

Still unclear

• What will paid credit cost and how will top-ups work once billing opens, and will the $1.10 hourly rate hold after the beta?
• When will desktop access, screenshots and the agent-driven GUI mode return for public accounts?