Run AI Agents Dirt Cheap on 'box': Full Ubuntu VMs in 2 Seconds, 10x Cheaper than E2B

Are your AI agents burning a hole in your wallet faster than they can write a buggy hello world? If you're building agentic platforms, software factories, or just trying to run autonomous coders without going broke, 'box' might just be the pragmatic solution you’ve been looking for.

What on Earth is 'box' and why are people hyping it?

Here’s the TL;DR for the lazy devs: 'box' gives you full Ubuntu VMs for your AI agents via a simple box new terminal command. In just 2 seconds, you get a beefy Ubuntu environment with admin rights, a desktop, and SSH access.

But the real kicker? It costs just $0.036/hour. The founders claim this is up to 10x cheaper than popular alternatives like E2B, Daytona, or Modal. The brain behind this project is an ex-European Space Agency (ESA) engineer who got tired of waiting two whole months for cloud provisioning just to run black hole simulations. He left, spent months building AI agents, realized sandbox hosting was extortionate, and built this tool instead.

Product Hunt Devs React: Pure Genius or Aggressive Oversubscription?

Naturally, devs on Product Hunt didn't just swallow the marketing pitch. They had questions, and things got pretty technical:

• The VM vs. Container Skeptics: How do you offer a full VM for $0.036/hr without aggressively oversubscribing the hardware? The founder jumped in to explain that they built a custom, dependency-free snapshotting system in-house, and that raw compute in European datacenters is incredibly cheap if you know how to build around it.
• The E2B Migrator: One dev mentioned they just spent days integrating E2B for testing dev tools and asked how Box compares. The simple answer? If you need a standard 4vCPU / 8GB RAM sandbox, Box is 9-10x cheaper for basically the same feature set.
• The Scale Test: Will fork/resume times crawl to a halt when spinning up hundreds of concurrent boxes for long-running agents? The founders assured the crowd that performance remains rock-solid even at a scale of thousands of boxes per user.
• CTO Flex: Box's CTO Kirill casually dropped that their MRR has grown 130x over the last six months. Clearly, developers love saving money.

The Coding4Food Verdict: Ship Lean, Cut the Middleman

What can we learn from the success of 'box'? Building with existing open-source giants is easy, but it often makes your infrastructure bloated and expensive. Sometimes, rolling your own custom, lightweight tech (like Box’s in-house snapshotting) is the only way to disrupt a crowded market.

If you're building AI applications, keep an eye on your infra costs before they spiral out of control. And if you're not ready to commit to managed sandbox APIs, you can always rent a reliable vps and configure your own sandbox environment. Keep it lean, keep it pragmatic.

Source

Check out the original launch here: Product Hunt - Box