[_jayhack_]

Would love to understand how you compare to other providers like Modal, Daytona, Blaxel, E2B and Vercel. I think most other agent builders will have the same question. Can you provide a feature/performance comparison matrix to make this easier?

[benswerd]

I'm working on an article deep diving into the differences between all of us. I think the goal of Freestyle is to be the most powerful and most EC2 like of the bunch.

Daytona runs on Sysbox (https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox) which is VM-like but when you run low level things it has issues.

Modal is the only provider with GPU support.

I haven't played around with Blaxel personally yet.

E2B/Vercel are both great hardware virtualized "sandboxes"

Freestyle VMS are built based on the feedback our users gave us that things they expected to be able to do on existing sandboxes didn't work. A good example here is Freestyle is the only provider of the above (haven't tested blaxel) that gives users access to the boot disk, or the ability to reboot a VM.

[tomComb]

And fly.io sprites

[benswerd]

Fly.io sprites is the most similar to us of the bunch. They do hardware virtualization as well, have comparable start times and are full Linux. What we call snapshots they call checkpoints.

The big pros of Sprites over us is their advanced networking stack and the Fly.io ecosystem. The big cons are that Sprites are incredibly bare bones — they don't have any templating utilities. I've also heard that Sprites sometimes become unavailable for extended periods of time.

The big pros of Freestyle over Sprites is fork, advanced templating, and IMO a better debugging experience because of our structure.

[knowsuchagency]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm predominantly a self-hoster, but I think your product makes a lot of sense for a wide variety of users and businesses. I'm excited to try out freestyle!

[benswerd]

Self hosting can be doable for constant small/medium size workloads

You can handroll a lot with: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox?tab=readme-ov-file https://gvisor.dev https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap?tab=readme-ov-file

For hardware virtualized machines it much harder but you can do it via: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/ https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor

Freestyle/other providers will likely provide better debugging experience but thats something you can probably get past for a lot of workloads.

The time when you/anyone should think about Freestyle/anyone is when the load spikes/the need to create hundreds of VMs in short spikes shows up, or when you're looking for some of the more complex feature sets any given provider has built out (forks, GPUs, network boundaries, etc).

I also highly recommend self hosting anything you do outside of your normal VPC. Sandboxes are the biggest possible attack surface and it is a feature of us that we're not in your cloud; If we mess up security your app is still fine.

[indigodaddy]

This is what I do (my project) for self hosting on a VPS/server:

https://GitHub.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

Also I'm a huge proponent of exe.dev

Obviously your service/approach is different than exe, more like sprites but like you said more targeted/opinionated to AI coding/sandboxing tasks it looks like. Interesting space for sure!

[kstenerud]

I built yoloAI, which is a single go binary that runs anywhere on mac or linux, sandboxing your agents in disposable containers or VMs, nested or not.

Your agent never has access to your secrets or even your workdir (only a copy, and only what you specify), and you pull the changes back with a diff/apply workflow, reviewing any changes before they land. You also control network access.

Free, open-source, no account needed.

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

[sahil-shubham]

I've been building an open-source, self-hostable Firecracker orchestrator for the past month: https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti (https://bhatti.sh)

Still WIP, but the core works — three rootfs tiers (minimal Ubuntu, headless Chromium with CDP, Docker-in-VM), OCI image support (pull any Docker image), automatic thermal management (idle VMs pause then snapshot to disk, wake transparently on next API call), per-user bridge networking with L2 isolation, named checkpoints, persistent volumes, and preview URLs with auto-wake.

Fair warning: the website is too technical and the docs are mostly AI-generated, both being actively reworked. But I've been running it daily on a Hetzner server for my AI agents' browser automation, and deploy previews.

I'd love any feedback if you want to go ahead and try it yourself

[0123456789ABCDE]

sprites have weird lately, i think fly.io is having trouble with capacity in various locations.

is the experience similar? can i just get console to one machine, work for a bit, logout. come back later, continue?

how does i cost work if i log into a machine and do nothing on it? just hold the connection.

[benswerd]

This will just work on us.

We do auto suspend depending on your configured timeout. We'll pause your VM and when you come back the processes will be in the exact same state as when you left.

[tomComb]

But your pricing page suggests that that is not available without a subscription: in the on-demand pricing section "persistent Snapshots" and "Persistent VM's" have an 'x'.

[benswerd]

We do not allow long term persistence for the free tier.

This is purely a defense mechanism, I don't want to guarantee storing the data of an entire VM forever for non paying users. We have persistence options for them like Sticky persistence but it doesn't come with the reliability of long term persistence storage.

[rsyring]

I'd also be interested in a comparison with exe.dev which I'm currently using.

[benswerd]

Exe.dev is a individual developer oriented service. Freestyle is more oriented at platforms building the next exe.dev.

Thats why our pricing is usage based and we have a much larger API surface.