> The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or

> The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about. You can also go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you do own. Suppose the developers and testers have Macs on their desks, but you still want to have your CI run in the Cloud. Now I'm not an expert on cloud pricing so I could be wrong, but I imagine you could benefit from paying by the minute in that case, depending on the specifics of your situation (builds per day, time per build, total cost of ownership of having a build farm in house).