Boxes or Sandboxes?
Which to start with: a box is a cloud machine you work on every day; a sandbox is a microVM your code creates and throws away.
On this page3
You want a box if you want a cloud machine to work on: your repo synced with your laptop, dev servers on your localhost, and coding agents that keep running with the laptop closed.
You want a sandbox if your code needs clean machines to run something in and throw away, often many at once.
Side by side
| Box | Sandbox (beta) | |
|---|---|---|
| Driven by | You, from your laptop through the prized CLI | Your code, through the API or prized sandbox |
| Lives | Until you delete it | Until your code deletes it, or 24 hours at most |
| Starts | Usually under a minute | Usually about five seconds |
| Billed | Monthly plan: hourly at its size's rate while awake, disk only while asleep | Per second, for the vCPU, memory, and disk it holds; paused, storage only |
| Sync and ports | Two-way folder sync, ports on your localhost, sessions that outlive a dropped connection | None: commands and file copies through the API or prized sandbox |
| Fork | prized fork copies its disk into a new box, in minutes | Into live copies, each with every process still running |
| Sizes and regions | Nano to Extra Large, in 5 regions | 1 to 8 vCPU and up to 16 GB, in us-west-2 (Oregon) |
| Best for | Your daily dev machine, and agents that run for days | Code you have not read, a clean machine per test run, one job fanned out across copies |
Using both
Boxes and sandboxes share one workspace: one account, one balance, one dashboard, the same API keys.
- One balance. Box hours and sandbox seconds draw on the same credit (Billing).
- $30 of free credit, no card. New workspaces get it once, for either: one box, Nano to Small, and sandboxes within the free tier (4 at once, each up to 2 vCPU, 4 GB, and 60 minutes).
- Paying in lifts the limits. A plan lifts the box rules; a plan or a top-up gives sandboxes the full quotas.
Start here
- A box: the Quickstart, four steps from sign-up to your project on a box.
- Sandboxes: the Sandboxes quickstart, whose Open Sandboxes link signs you up with no box tour.