Box by ASCII
Box is a cloud sandbox product by ASCII that provisions persistent Linux (Ubuntu) virtual machines on Hetzner Cloud infrastructure. It is built for AI coding agents (such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenCode) and developers running parallel agent workflows, and exposes a CLI, HTTP API, and Python and TypeScript SDKs for programmatic control.
| 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. | Hetzner Cloud VPS (current CX33); hypervisor not stated in docs |
| 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.
Box runs only in EU regions (DE/FI/FR), offers a single fixed machine spec with no GPU and no larger sizes, and SOC 2 compliance is described as 'in progress'.
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/billing.md
- https://ascii.dev/pricing
- https://box.ascii.dev/compare
Last verified 2026-08-09. Corrections land through the update log.