Launched this week
box
Simple computers for agent w/ full VMs
379 followers
Simple computers for agent w/ full VMs
379 followers
Box offers the simplest, cheapest cloud computers for agents, thought for builders of agentic platforms & software factories. Run 'box new' in your terminal, in 2s get a beefy ubuntu VM, with admin rights, a desktop, ssh access. At $0.036/hr it is 10x less expensive than the likes of E2B, Daytona, Modal, so you can run more agents, or run them longer. Run up to 1000 concurrent boxes fully self-served, or ask us for more, with same-day support from the founders.
The ESA-to-cheap-VMs origin is a fun one. The number I keep circling is the $0.036/hr — is that flat always-on, or does a box idle between agent turns bill differently? I run a bursty API on Fly and the thing that makes the economics work there is machines auto-stopping to near-zero between requests. An agent box is the opposite shape though: long-lived, holding state, mostly waiting on a model call. At 1000 concurrent that idle-but-alive time is most of the bill. Do you lean on suspend/resume for that, or is the bet that flat-and-cheap beats clever-and-metered for this workload?
Full VMs instead of a locked-down sandbox feels like the right call for agents that actually need to do things. A lot of agent failures come from environments too restricted to be useful. The tension you're managing is the interesting part: a real computer per agent is powerful, but it's also the thing that keeps security folks up at night. How do you keep a confused or rogue agent contained without clipping the wings that make box worth using?
The 2s-to-VM claim caught my eye — that's the number that matters for agent workloads. Question: can you snapshot a warm VM and fork it? The pattern I keep hitting is N agents that all need the same base environment (deps installed, repo cloned) — cold-booting each one wastes most of the cost advantage. If 'box new --from-snapshot' exists, that's the killer feature. Congrats on the launch.
$0.036/hr for a full VM with admin rights is a wild undercut of E2B/Daytona - what's actually different on the infra side that gets you there, bare metal instead of nested virtualization, oversubscribed hosts, or just thinner margins for now? asking because a price that much lower than everyone else usually means either a real efficiency win or something that gets quietly walked back once you're past the free/intro tier.
the isolation questions above are the ones I'd want answered before trusting this with anything real, but the one nobody's asked yet is billing-side: at $0.036/hr an agent that hangs or loops instead of exiting cleanly is cheap per hour but not necessarily cheap per incident if nobody's watching it. is there an auto-kill on idle/runaway processes, a hard spend cap per box, or is the ephemeral-and-cheap pricing itself the safety net and you're expected to monitor it yourself?
The admin-rights VM detail matters. A lot of agent workflows fail in the messy middle between “clean sandbox” and “real developer machine”: credentials, GUI state, build artifacts, package caches, long-running processes. Cheap is useful, but realistic state is what makes debugging and delegation practical.
Very cool product. Having deployed at scale, most agent sandbox pain is re-provisioning, not compute. Curious how fast fork actually is under load. The persistent-VM + fork-from-snapshot combo is the part that actually changes how you build agent loops.
box
@aidan_codefox So many hard problems to solve in that space for so many different usecase.
We catter best to long running agent whose data is precious and never to be lost