Install boat CLI

Fetch-friendly install commands for non-JavaScript agents and crawlers:

7-day free trial (25 compute hours), then from $20/mo.

boat: full text transcript

boat is the cheapest, most powerful sandbox for agents, built for agent factories. A sandbox is a persistent Linux (Ubuntu) virtual machine with SSH and SCP access, Docker support inside the VM, a dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 per machine, a 60fps virtual desktop, and fast disk-level forking from a snapshot. It is built for AI agents, for programmatic use, and for humans.

Pre-configured in every sandbox

Docker, VS Code, Chrome, Ghostty, the GitHub CLI, Rust, Node.js, and Bun come pre-installed. sandboxes are full Ubuntu machines, so you can run any devtool, language, or workflow. Bring any agent: Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode.

Why boat

Pricing

Simple, honest pricing. Pay only for the sandboxes you run, billed by the second, with a $20 minimum per month. $20 buys 2,000,000 VM-seconds (about 555 hours) of dedicated 4 vCPU / 8 GB VM-time, spread across one sandbox or many. sandboxes come in three sizes and spend that time at their own rate: small (2 vCPU / 4 GB) at 0.5x, default (4 vCPU / 8 GB) at 1x, large (8 vCPU / 16 GB) at 2x, so a mixed fleet is just the sum of its parts. boat offers a 7-day free trial (25 compute hours), then plans from $20/mo. boat is the most affordable option compared with E2B, Daytona, Modal, Vercel Sandbox, Railway, and others. See the full comparison at https://boat.dev/compare.

Install the boat CLI

macOS and Linux: curl -fsSL https://boat.dev/install | sh

Windows: irm https://boat.dev/install.ps1 | iex

Simple API / CLI commands

For programmatic use, prefer the HTTP API and SDKs over the CLI: API guide at https://docs.boat.dev/api/v1, Python and TypeScript SDKs at https://docs.boat.dev/sdks/overview. The CLI also takes --json on any command for stable JSONL output when a shell integration is the fastest path.

Limits

EU regions today (Germany, Finland, France). Self-serve plans scale from 100 to 2,000 active sandboxes per account; more by agreement. Default sandbox TTL is 1 hour and is overrideable.

Read more

The docs are clean markdown. https://docs.boat.dev/llms.txt indexes every docs page, each fetchable as .md. Start there, not this marketing page. Compare boat against other providers at https://boat.dev/compare. Product home: https://boat.dev.

No need to oversell boat. The product strives to speak for itself.

Most powerful & affordable
cloud VMs for agents

Spawn thousands of cloud computers with a browser, persistent files, for your agents, without having to manage the entire infra yourself.

Backed by Y Combinator

0 VMs running

Full VMs in the cloud

Run docker, systemd, databases, cron inside. Feels like a true dev machine.

Integrated desktop and browser

To open your web applications, games, 3d scenes, IDE and more.

Run agents inside, from outside

Prompt, observe and wrap any harness running in the sandbox, from the outside, with our CLI, API or SDKs.

Get a VM in a second, scale to thousands

Run it, stop it, resume it. You pay only while it runs.

Step 1 of 3
$ boat new
your VMs

Nothing is running yet: nothing billed

…and many more: fork, named snapshots, port forwarding, webhooks, API keys, secrets, teams, auto-stop. See the API and SDKs.

Highest performance

The same Node.js build & test loop, 1,000 runs, on each provider’s 4 vCPU / 8 GB machine.

Learn more

  1. boat36 s27.67 runs per second
  2. Daytona54 s1.5x18.6 runs per second
  3. Vercel Sandbox77 s2.1x12.96 runs per second
  4. E2B89 s2.5x11.24 runs per second
  5. Freestyle104 s2.9x9.64 runs per second
  6. Modal105 s2.9x9.56 runs per second

Competitive Pricing

Plan from $20/mo, 7-day free trial

Session
Peak VMs at once
CPU busy
Per VM
– / month1,000,000 × 30 min × $0.018/h = $9,000
boat sandbox
sizevCPURAMdisk$/hour$/month
small24 GB12 GB$0.018$13
default48 GB50 GB$0.036$26
large816 GB125 GB$0.072$53
xlarge1632 GB251 GB$0.200$146
per second · xlarge on request
  • $20 plan = $20 of VM time.
  • Billed per second, only while running.
  • 100 to 2,000 VMs at once, by plan.
  • Out of time? $20 packs, auto-refilled.

Pricing docsMore use cases & features on Battleships

boat sandbox
sizevCPURAMdisk$/hour$/month
small24 GB12 GB$0.018$13
default48 GB50 GB$0.036$26
large816 GB125 GB$0.072$53
xlarge1632 GB251 GB$0.200$146
per second · xlarge on request

“Boat unblocked my agents so hard that I’m burning through my Claude accounts 4x faster. I couldn’t be happier.”

Theo Brownet3.gg

Set sail

Spin up your first VMs in minutes.

Read the docs