I have so many interesting problems on Ai, sandboxing isn't one of them. It's a pointless excercise yet disproportionately so many people love to to do this. Probably because sandboxing doesn't feel as magic as Agents itself and more like the old times of "traditional" software development.
MarcelinoGMX3C 6 minutes ago [-]
The technical challenges in getting memory forking to deliver those sub-second start and fork times are significant. I've seen the pain of trying to achieve that level of state transfer and rapid provisioning. While "EC2-like" gets the point across for many, going bare metal reveals the practical limits of cloud virtualization for high-performance, complex workloads like these. It shows a real understanding of where cloud abstraction helps and where it just adds overhead.
The cost argument for owning the hardware for this specific use case also makes sense, considering the scale these agent environments will demand. Also worth noting, sandboxes are effectively an open attack surface; architecting them not to be in your main VPC is a sound security decision from the start.
skybrian 5 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't seem very easy to calculate how much it would cost per month to keep a mostly-idle VM running (for example, with a personal web app). The $20/month plan from exe.dev seems more hobbyist-friendly for that. Maybe that's not the intended use, though?
_jayhack_ 41 minutes ago [-]
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 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
rsyring 13 minutes ago [-]
I'd also be interested in a comparison with exe.dev which I'm currently using.
tomComb 30 minutes ago [-]
And fly.io sprites
benswerd 23 minutes ago [-]
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 18 minutes ago [-]
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 12 minutes ago [-]
Self hosting can be doable for constant small/medium size workloads
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 7 minutes ago [-]
This is what I do (my project) for self hosting on a VPS/server:
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!
borakostem 6 minutes ago [-]
Forking full VM memory state with ~400ms pause is genuinely impressive — that’s closer to process-level time travel than typical sandboxing. Curious how you’re handling consistency for network/socket state across forks, and what breaks in practice?
n2d4 58 minutes ago [-]
Cool! I've been using your API for running sandboxed JS. Nice to see you also support VMs now.
> we mean forking the whole memory of it
How does this work? Are you copying the entire snapshot, or is this something fancy like copy-on-write memory? If it's the former, doesn't the fork time depend on the size of the machine?
benswerd 48 minutes ago [-]
We're using copy on write with the memory itself. Fork time is completely decoupled from the size of the machine.
Creating snapshots takes a 2-4 second interruption in the VM due to sheer IO that we didn't want here.
Whats especially cool about this approach is not only is fork time O(1) with respect to machine size, but its also O(1) with respect to the amount of forks.
Fraaaank 33 minutes ago [-]
Your pricing page is broken
benswerd 32 minutes ago [-]
Reviewing this now. our public pricing at www.freestyle.sh/pricing seems to be working, can you point me in a more specific direction?
aplomb1026 20 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 17:50:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The cost argument for owning the hardware for this specific use case also makes sense, considering the scale these agent environments will demand. Also worth noting, sandboxes are effectively an open attack surface; architecting them not to be in your main VPC is a sound security decision from the start.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Creating snapshots takes a 2-4 second interruption in the VM due to sheer IO that we didn't want here.
Whats especially cool about this approach is not only is fork time O(1) with respect to machine size, but its also O(1) with respect to the amount of forks.