Company commitments. Offer value.

COMPANY RUBRIC · 2026-09-24.company-v2

Company grades: fixed rules, no overall average

Compare one row per company across the six dimensions below. A grade describes documented commitments, not measured reliability, customer satisfaction or a guarantee of safety. Price, hardware, value scores, brand size, identity evidence and US listing eligibility earn no points.

0/3 — No evidence · 1/3 — Bad · 2/3 — Good · 3/3 — Excellent. These are editorial ratings against the documented criteria below, not universal judgments about the company. Every listed company has all six scores. Zero means insufficient supported evidence to establish a grade, not proven poor service.

How a grade is assigned

Each underlying criterion has a fixed excellent (3), good (2), bad (1) or no-evidence (0) grade. A dimension receives 0 if any required criterion lacks current, consistent evidence. Otherwise its grade is the lowest of those criteria, not an average. This prevents strengths in one protection from concealing a documented weakness in another. Open a company’s scorecard to see every criterion, its rule, explanation, date and source.

SLA uses the availability/remedy criterion; support requires both human support access and incident response; security requires account/team controls, workload/credential protection and security/data terms; data lifecycle uses retention/deletion/recovery responsibilities; billing clarity requires charge structure, cancellation and entitlements. Workflow requires all six criteria for the selected service category. Ancillary technical-documentation, status-history and operator criteria remain visible in the underlying coverage count, but do not create extra ranking points.

Company scope, without promising every plan

Evidence is recorded against an explicit reference plan in each service category. Paid support, an enterprise SLA or a platform-wide guarantee is not silently attributed to every Mac offering. The company-wide grade uses the lowest service-category grade, including 0 for a missing required scope. Differing documented scopes remain labeled “Varies by service” in the evidence. Selecting a category changes the workflow comparison; the other dimensions remain company-wide. The supporting plan and commitment scope always stay visible.

Zero records an evidence gap

“Unknown” means the finding has not been established; “Needs review” means evidence is conflicting, unsupported, stale or inconsistent with the rubric. Both receive 0/3 until supported. A statement that a feature was not found is not proof it is absent. Company evidence is rechecked after 30 days; expired evidence stops supporting a positive grade. A score of 1 requires an explicit applicable limitation, not just an unsuccessful search. A complete scored profile is not a claim that all its facts have been verified.

Coverage counts resolved underlying criteria, not company quality. Company sorting uses only the selected dimension: 3, 2, 1, then 0; equal grades are tied and displayed alphabetically. There is no blended winner, percentile normalization, sponsorship adjustment or completeness bonus. Adding cheaper offers or duplicate configurations cannot improve a company grade.

Identity evidence is shown separately as provider-disclosed, public-filing, parent-product, affiliate, registry-mirror or network-registry evidence. Listing eligibility is an editorial policy, not a registration certification. Sources and limitations are on the identity page. Legacy 100-point assessment fields remain in compatibility APIs; they are not the current company ranking.

OFFER VALUE · 2026-09-24.value-v5

Value calculated from the offering

Every offering has a score from 0 to 100. It uses the values available in the catalog and recalculates when those values or your usage assumptions change. Missing fields broaden the comparison; they do not prevent a score.

The price formula

Score = round(100 × reference price ÷ (reference price + offering price))

The reference is the median positive price in the comparison group, with each provider contributing its cheapest eligible offering once. An offering at the reference price scores 50; one at half that price scores 67. Zero modeled cost scores 100. For example, a reference of $120 and an offering price of $90 produce 57/100. This is a relative value score, not a review grade or a performance benchmark.

Use the available data

First, we calculate the bill from the listed rate, usage, minimum purchase, billing period, setup and required fees. If some billing details are missing, we use a partial estimate from the listed price and identify which charges are excluded. The complete bill remains separate from that estimate. Missing prices never become zero.

We first look for another provider in the same category with the same chip and RAM, then widen to the same chip, the same RAM, or the category as a whole. CPU, storage and every other field do not need to be filled in. There is no minimum of three providers. The current catalog uses US dollars, displayed as $. For Blacksmith, Harness, Mac Mini Vault’s Studio listings, Namespace and use.computer, the cited rate uses only a dollar sign. We interpret those 25 prices as US dollars for comparison and record currency_basis: comparison_assumption in their source facts. This is an editorial assumption, not provider confirmation or an exchange-rate conversion. Other explicitly named currencies are never silently relabeled as US dollars.

If a usable price is absent, the provisional score averages the available CPU, RAM and storage capacity scores. Each is 100 × documented quantity ÷ (documented quantity + category reference), using the median of each provider’s median quantity as the reference. CPU kinds and RAM units are kept separate. This estimates capacity, not performance per dollar. When no usable price or capacity quantities are available, the offering gets a provisional neutral 50/100. Its source gaps remain visible.

Usage and commitments

CI defaults to 1,000 compute minutes per month over 12 months, in 10-minute jobs, with private repositories and one user. Dedicated Macs and VMs default to one continuous 720-hour allocation. Change the assumptions above the table. Minutes represent compute consumption, not completed builds.

Known billing periods, job increments and minimum allocations feed the cost. A two-hour rental with a 24-hour minimum pays for 24 hours. Annual purchases include the full payment even during a shorter comparison. Alternative billing terms are separate purchases; the lowest modeled bill in the selected billing unit and currency is used. Calendar estimates use 30-day months, 90-day quarters and 365-day years. Optional add-ons, transfer, extra storage and applicable taxes are outside the base scenario.

Required per-user plans use one user. Shared account credits are assumed already used. Known bundle overage prices are included. If a paid bundle has no documented overage price, a provisional estimate may extrapolate its unit cost; this is labeled and is not an available purchase quote. Exhausting a free bundle never makes additional usage free. Unresolved fees, credit purchase rules and older evidence remain visible beside the estimate.

Included usage and Apple membership

Eligible zero-cost usage receives 100/100 and the label “Free / included.” Public-repository eligibility must be documented for the specific offering. Paid larger runners do not inherit another runner’s free allowance.

When Apple membership is already held, the calculator excludes that existing cost. When a new membership is needed, it includes the full annual fee from the catalog, payable upfront. A paid compute bundle replaces its plan allowance; membership hours are not added again. No provider receives bonus points based on its name.

The comparison-rate column assumes full use of each monthly bundle. For Xcode Cloud’s included tier: $99 ÷ (12 months × 25 hours × 60 minutes) = $0.0055/minute. This allocates the standard annual membership fee entirely to compute even though membership includes other benefits. It is not pay-as-you-go pricing; unused monthly hours do not roll over and fee waivers are not assumed. Paid tiers add the annual membership allocation to their compute subscription. “Already held” shows incremental compute cost with the membership exclusion labeled. Estimated bill uses your selected usage and the full required purchase instead of assuming full utilization. Sources: Apple membership and Xcode Cloud plans.

September 24 pricing review

All 19 listed providers’ 117 offerings were reviewed against first-party pricing, public order catalogs or machine-readable price schedules. Price facts carry their own sources, dates and qualifications. A verified number is not a verified complete invoice: subscription fees, prepaid budgets, currency, availability and configuration matching remain separate. Quote-only plans are not assigned invented prices. Dollar-only quotes follow the disclosed comparison assumption above.

The dated review corrects displayed price facts without rewriting the underlying research. Newer collected price observations supersede it; after 30 days its facts require review again. Price updates do not change company grades. Starting-price and usage-limited plans remain qualified; an included-hours VM bundle is not treated as unlimited month-long rental.

Comparison scope

Region, software, services and capability filters narrow the comparison group. Text search, provider selection, sorting and pagination do not change the reference group. Equal specifications do not establish equal speed, isolation, uptime or support. Availability is separate from value; missing inventory is not zero stock.

Sorting and updates

“Value score: high to low” sorts every offering by its numeric score. The directory table leads with the modeled bill for your assumptions; the score stays beside it as relative context. The default discovery order still spreads providers across published-price groups. Open “Calculation & assumptions” for the score basis, reference prices, known charges and sources. Published catalog changes automatically feed the formula; the formula itself does not fetch external pricing pages.

Historical provider service assessments remain in compatibility API fields and do not contribute to the current offering score.