Do you even need a sandbox?

1. Your own computer

Free, and the quickest way to try an agent. It stops when the computer sleeps or loses its connection, and the agent can read and change your own files. Fine for an afternoon, not for something you message from your phone.

2. A plain rented server (a VPSA virtual private server: a machine you rent by the month that runs all the time. Cheaper for one always-on agent, but you set it up and look after it yourself.)

A whole machine in a data centre at a flat monthly price, running all the time. You connect to it from aterminalA text window where you type commands instead of clicking. Many providers can be set up only this way; the guide says when one cannot., install the agent by following its guide, and you keep the system updated and secure yourself. The Hermes README describes running it on "a $5 VPS". Nothing is sealed off: if the agent misbehaves, it can damage only that server, which is the main thing a sandbox would add.

3. An app platform

Services like Fly.io, Railway and Render run a program from a template or a short configuration file and keep it running. Less server upkeep than a VPS, more setup than a one-click service. OpenClaw publishes guides for Fly.io and Render.

4. A managed one-click service

You sign up, pick the agent from a list and connect your chat app. No terminal. The trade is choice: you get the agents and settings the service offers, and moving away later means starting over.

5. A cloud sandbox

A sealed-off machine you create from a program or a dashboard, often in under a second, billed by the second, and easy to copy, pause or throw away. Built for software that creates machines on demand. See what sandboxes offer and what people run on them.

One machine with 2 vCPUOne share of a processor. More vCPUs let a machine do more things at once; an agent waiting for messages uses a small fraction of one. and 4 GB of memory that stays on all month, the size this guide uses for a personal Hermes or OpenClaw agent. Prices are the published list prices, before tax, read on 2026-10-29. The AI model is billed separately and is the same wherever the machine lives.

Those are the three cheapest of the 11 sandboxes that can run this machine. The middle one, Sandboxer, comes to $40.00. Change the numbers in the calculator.

• The agent runs code you did not write, such as code from your customers or from the model itself, and it must not reach anything else. Sandboxes are built to keep it sealed in.
• You need many machines, briefly. A thousand ten-minute jobs a month cost a few dollars on a sandbox; a server would sit idle the rest of the time.
• It should cost nothing while nobody uses it. Several sandboxes sleep when idle and wake on a request, so a part-time agent pays for part-time hours.
• You want to copy, roll back or pause it. SnapshotsA saved copy of a machine at one moment, so it can be restored or copied later. Some providers save memory and running programs too, others only files. and forksStarting one or more new machines from a snapshot, each continuing from the same point. Useful for trying several things in parallel. let you save a machine exactly as it is and start new ones from that point.
• Your own software creates the machines. Every sandbox has an API for this; a VPS usually means a person clicking.

• One personal agent, on all the time, that only you use. A server at a flat price usually wins on cost, and the isolation a sandbox adds protects little that a separate server does not.
• You want no setup at all. Most sandboxes expect you to follow developer instructions. A managed one-click service, or Agent 37's one-click route, is closer to what you want.
• A predictable bill matters more than flexibility. Flat monthly prices are easier to plan around than per-second rates.

The server and app-platform prices on this page were read once, on 2026-10-29. Unlike the sandbox rates, they are not checked again with each update, so follow the links before you rely on them.