The problem is not the first time setup. The problem is essentially what “uptime” you can provide. Once you setup an infrastructure many people come to depend on it.

Lets say two teams lose half a day when that CI/CD mac mini goes down then paying for a cloud provider to manage many instances and “sharing them ondemand” makes a lot of monetary sense.

Of course, paying a cloud provider may or may not make sense for hobbyists. Personally, I pay for cloud storage - thats super hard to get right.

Besides, if your cloud spend is already a fuckton, $24 per day extra is not going to make you blink.

Otherwise I agree. 24 hour minimum removes immediate scaling as an option, and for anyone who already has their own infrastructure the cost is prohibitively high. My hope would be that with time, at the very least the 24 hour minimum would eventually be removed, and ideally the price will come down too.

Perhaps it's good for render farms. Instead of building a giant render farm that sits idle between productions, you spin up a render farm only when you need one.

If you're already in AWS, your deployment infrastructure and tooling is already configured and tuned for AWS. Deploying a Mac EC2 instance is just adding another target. Whereas deploying to another provider is an unknown amount of work to integrate with their API (if they even have one). The wall-time cost of people's time and effort vastly outweighs the marginal savings you'd get by going with a low-cost provider.