boat by ASCII
boat by ASCII provides full Linux cloud virtual machines that agents or their harnesses can control through the CLI, API, SDKs, SSH, and desktop access. Each sandbox is a persistent Ubuntu VM with Docker pre-installed. ASCII builds it for long-running agents, development workflows, hosted services, previews, and platforms that give each user or agent a sandbox.
| Pricing model | Per-second, billed only while boxes are running; stopped boxes are free |
|---|---|
| Pricing The headline compute price as the provider states it. Sorting ranks prices stated per vCPU over time, converted to hourly. Other pricing models sort after, unranked. | $0.036 per hour per box (4 shared vCPU / 8 GB RAM / 75 GB NVMe) |
| Free while idle Whether a stopped, paused, or sleeping sandbox costs nothing. | ✓ |
| Elastic Resources flex with what the sandbox actually uses, and the bill follows: yes when the provider bills on active or observed use, no when capacity is reserved or allocated and billed while it runs. | ✕ |
| Memory snapshots Whether RAM state survives a pause and resume, not just disk. | ✕ |
| Wake on request Whether a stopped sandbox wakes automatically on inbound traffic. | – |
| Start / resume Typical time from create or resume to running. Sorting ranks stated times, converted to seconds; claims with no figure sort after, unranked. | A few seconds for resume; create time not explicitly stated in extracted docs |
| Max runtime The longest a sandbox may run. | Default TTL overrideable up to 30 days; can disable auto-stop with ttl=null |
| Isolation The isolation technology between sandboxes. | Linux (Ubuntu) VM, normally on AMD Ryzen 9 9950X bare-metal hosts, with Hetzner cloud VM fallback when capacity is exhausted; hypervisor not stated |
| GPUs Whether GPU instances are available for sandboxes. | ✕ |
| Docker Whether Docker containers can run inside the sandbox. | ✓ |
| SDKs | Python, TypeScript |
✓ yes · ✕ no · – no cited public fact.
ASCII renamed the product from Box to boat; the free trial requires auto-stop and limits each sandbox to 2 hours.
Sources
- https://box.ascii.dev/
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/machines
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/faq.md
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/sdks/overview
- https://docs.ascii.dev/llms.txt
- https://docs.ascii.dev
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/faq
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/long-running-tasks.md
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/long-running-tasks
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/snapshots.md
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/snapshots
- https://docs.ascii.dev/box/billing.md
- https://ascii.dev/pricing
- https://box.ascii.dev/compare
- https://boat.dev/
- https://docs.boat.dev/billing
- https://docs.boat.dev/quickstart
- https://docs.boat.dev/long-running-tasks
- https://docs.boat.dev/platform-guide
Last verified 2026-10-01. Corrections land through the update log.