What you're seeing is actually pricing for our automated testing service. Sauce for Mac is either free (30 mins of testing/mo) or $12/mo (for unlimited minutes against all browsers). It also comes included with all the testing plans on that page.

Whoa, this is news to me, I checked out sauce a month or so ago and came to the same conclusion as highwind. $12/mo is something that I would be more interested in. You should make that way more obvious. I haven't fully harnessed the power of TDD and it isn't used at my current job so I have no use for it. On the other hand the ability to test websites on different browsers is very important to my job and for $12/mo it's something I can afford to get for myself to use for work and personal projects.

This needs to be clarified on sauceio.com/mac. It's very confusing right now to go to pricing and not understand what it's for.

Maintaining selenium testing infrastructure is hell. Absolute hell. Sauce means you're not wasting time on that. I've watched people at both of my companies blow TONS of time on this, for relatively little results.

(Disclaimer: some of my friends work at Sauce.)

Greetings, we just made some changes, ran the tests and deployed an update to the Sauce for Mac launch page -- it should now be clear that you can use the desktop app to your heart's content for $12/mo. http://saucelabs.com/mac

Thanks for all the great feedback everyone.

"recommended" doesn't mean - must buy. i use the $12 a month and it gets me what i need.

There might be OS licensing issues involved in having people launch a VM running Windows or Mac OS X. Perhaps some of those costs are factored in?

I've had great experience with http://crossbrowsertesting.com/, it costs $29.95 per month. I can't recommend it enough. You can't start a VM from a desktop program but all it takes is a few clicks in the browser, and everything works like a charm.

Your own VMs have to be created, stored and maintained. For small shops, managing even a relatively small catalogs of images can be quite a time-consuming process, let alone building multiple automated test processes.

No one said you need to test every browser. I mean, pragmatically speaking, basically you need to test the major versions of IE on Windows if you're already on a Mac.