Alternatives to Vercel Sandbox
Vercel Sandbox: Firecracker microVM sandboxes on Vercel for running untrusted or agent-written code, from a JavaScript or Python SDK or the CLI: Node.js, Python and coding agents in the default image or your own OCI image, Docker inside, persistent sandboxes, snapshots and drives. CPU is billed only while active, with a free monthly quota on Hobby. Looking for something different? Here are other tools in Hosting & Deployment.
Vercel
Frontend cloud for deploying Next.js and other frameworks with preview deployments and edge network.
Netlify
Platform for deploying web projects with Git-based builds, functions and forms.
Cloudflare Pages
Deploy static and full-stack sites on Cloudflare's global network, integrated with Workers.
Render
Cloud platform for web services, static sites, cron jobs, workers and managed Postgres.
Railway
Infrastructure platform to deploy apps and databases from a repo with minimal config.
Fly.io
Run full-stack apps and databases close to users on Fly Machines (lightweight VMs).
OneDeploy
Deploys open-source apps (WordPress, Gitea, Grafana, Dify and dozens more) on a dedicated server with TLS and nightly backups, billed hourly with a monthly cap.
Tofu
Paste one message into your coding agent and your app goes live at its own link; Tofu also sets up saved data, sign-in, a custom domain and user emails in one account. Free for one app, paid plans from Starter.
deCDN
Open-source peer-to-peer CDN where anyone can serve bytes, every chunk is BLAKE3-verified and clients pay per megabyte in USDC, targeting about $0.01/GB; currently on testnet.
Buddy Sandboxes
Persistent Linux VM sandboxes for AI coding agents from Buddy: Ubuntu with passwordless sudo, Docker, SSH, a 50 GB disk that survives restarts, public HTTPS endpoints and snapshots, up to 12 vCPU and 24 GB of RAM, driven from a CLI, TypeScript SDK, REST API or MCP tool call. $0.0144 per vCPU-hour plus $0.0144 per GB of RAM an hour, billed by the minute.
CtrlOps
Local-first desktop app for managing Linux servers: AI terminal that turns plain English into shell commands, one-click GitHub deploys, file manager, monitoring, security audits and SSH key management; from $7/month or $149 lifetime.
LiteDeck
Agentless desktop GUI for managing servers over plain SSH: files, editor, services, processes, containers, network, sessions, monitoring and a terminal in one window, with nothing installed on the server; macOS, Windows and Linux, Apache-2.0.
Pando
Open-source, self-hosted platform for running internal apps, including AI-built ones: point it at a git repo or image and it builds the app, scans it for vulnerabilities, runs it on an isolated network and puts it behind your SSO. Alpha, needs Docker; AGPL-3.0.
Stackdome
Open-source, self-hostable alternative to Railway, Render and Heroku on Kubernetes: deploy from GitHub or an image, wire services on a visual canvas, managed Postgres with backups and PITR, per-branch preview environments and whole-stack rollbacks. Drive it from a coding agent skill, the canvas or a CLI; MIT licensed.
Sectr
Serverless backend platform for deploying AI agents built with LangGraph, the OpenAI Agents SDK or Pydantic AI in two lines: one transcript of every message, tool call and approval, agents that scale to zero while waiting for human approval and resume where they stopped, and an AG-UI endpoint for CopilotKit or any frontend. sectr dev gives a local chat UI; free to deploy during beta.
E2B
Open-source (Apache-2.0) cloud sandboxes for AI agents: each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM that resumes from a snapshot, driven from the Python or JavaScript SDK, with a Code Interpreter SDK for running model-written code. The runtime can be self-hosted on your own hardware. Hobby is free with a one-time $100 credit; Pro is $150 a month plus per-second usage.
Daytona
Sandboxes for AI-generated code, each with its own kernel, filesystem and network: Linux, Windows, macOS and GPU machines built from OCI images or snapshots, with volumes, computer use and an MCP server, driven from SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Ruby, Go and Java. Runs on Daytona's cloud or your own compute. Pay per second, with $200 of free compute.
Modal Sandboxes
Sandboxes on Modal's serverless cloud for running untrusted or LLM-written code, created from Python, JavaScript or Go: gVisor isolation, or a VM with its own Linux kernel when you need Docker or FUSE, plus GPUs, custom images, volumes, filesystem snapshots and runs of up to 24 hours. Billed per second; the Starter plan includes $30 of compute a month.
Cloudflare Sandbox SDK
Open-source (Apache-2.0) SDK for per-user or per-task Linux sandboxes started from your Worker: each sandbox is a Durable Object plus a Container, a microVM with its own kernel and network, and @cloudflare/sandbox adds file streaming, S3 bucket mounts and directory backups to R2. Needs the $5 Workers Paid plan.
Runloop
Devboxes for AI agents: micro-VM sandboxes with a VM and a container as two layers of isolation, on arm64 or x86, with full Docker support, snapshots you can branch from, suspend and resume, and browser and computer use. Python and TypeScript SDKs (MIT). Free plan plus usage with a $50 trial credit; Pro is $250 a month; Enterprise deploys into your own AWS, GCP or Azure.
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