boat vs Crusoe
Crusoe is a GPU cloud: you rent Nvidia and AMD GPU machines and plain CPU VMs, and you build everything on top. boat is a sandbox cloud for AI agents, where every sandbox is a full VM that saves itself every minute, forks while running and comes with a desktop and coding agents.
Where boat stands out
Work that saves itself and forks live
boat snapshots every sandbox every minute and on stop, and you can fork a sandbox while it runs. On Crusoe the only copy is a custom image of the boot disk, and the VM must be shut off to make one. A stopped boat sandbox costs nothing, while a stopped Crusoe VM keeps paying for its OS disk.
A desktop and coding agents inside
Each boat sandbox ships a 60fps desktop with Chromium, computer use, and Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others that you drive from outside with a prompt, steer and events API. A Crusoe VM starts as a bare Ubuntu server. Its MCP server inspects your infrastructure; it does not run agents.
Hosting and keys handled for you
boat gives each sandbox token-protected HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports, plus raw TCP and its own IP. Its AI credentials proxy keeps real API keys outside the sandbox and can switch to another account when one runs out of credits. Crusoe gives you a public IP and TCP load balancers, and secrets sit on the VM.
The companies and products
boat
boat.dev runs sandboxes for AI agents: each one is a full Linux VM with its own kernel.
You start a machine with one command or one API call, then SSH in, run Docker, open a desktop, or let a built-in agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) work in it. The disk stays between sessions, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing.
- Isolation
- Full VM per sandbox, own kernel
- Regions
- EU: Germany, Finland, France
Crusoe
Crusoe calls itself "the AI factory company": it builds energy-first data centers and rents GPU and CPU machines on Crusoe Cloud.
Crusoe Cloud is infrastructure for training and serving models: Nvidia and AMD GPU VMs, general-purpose and storage CPU VMs, disks, managed Kubernetes and Slurm, and managed inference. You create Ubuntu VMs through a console, CLI, Terraform or API, log in over SSH and install what you need. It is not a sandbox product, so this page compares the CPU VMs where it overlaps with boat.
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “3rd cheapest of 367” means 2 of the other 366 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | boat: price rank | Crusoe: price rank |
|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Crusoe's CPU VMs can run the code, but with no desktop, no coding agents and no forks of a running machine it is a compromise; boat has all three on every sandbox. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month | 232nd of 367, with limits $2,996 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An always-on assistant on Crusoe is a plain VM you set up and watch yourself; boat gives it a desktop, a browser and agents you drive with an API. | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month | 234th of 366, with limits $3,000 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Crusoe fits short bursts better here because it has no start-rate limit in its terms, while boat's starts per minute make a big burst a compromise. | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month | 128th of 345, with limits $268 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Crusoe has no HTTPS URLs for each machine, so serving your users means running your own proxy and TLS on public IPs or a TCP load balancer. | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month | 104th of 361, with limits $951 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month | 71st of 360, with limits $4,055 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month | 43rd cheapest of 364 $811 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month | 48th cheapest of 377 $395 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month | 87th cheapest of 368 $121 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Crusoe has no desktop or computer-use tools, so you would install and stream a desktop yourself; boat ships a 60fps desktop with Chromium. | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month | 221st of 369, with limits $811 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month On Crusoe you install and run the browser yourself on a server image; boat sandboxes come with Chromium and browser control. | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month | 246th of 367, with limits $405 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month | 268th of 346, with limits $403 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month | 201st of 338, with limits $8,055 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month | 201st of 360, with limits $207 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month Only Crusoe fits: it rents Nvidia and AMD GPUs, and boat has no GPUs. | Can't run it | 86th of 98, with limits $7,803 a month |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | boat | Crusoe |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A sandbox for agents: a full VM with tools, desktop and agents ready | A plain Ubuntu VM you set up yourself, plus GPUs, Kubernetes and Slurm |
| Isolation | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts | Full VM on cloud-hypervisor |
| Root, Docker and nested virtualization | Root, systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm on every machine | sudo user (root login deprecated); Docker preinstalled on GPU images; nested virtualization not documented |
| Saving work | Automatic snapshots every minute and on stop | The OS disk and attached disks survive a stop; no snapshots of disks or running VMs; local NVMe is erased on stop |
| Fork and templates | Fork a running sandbox; named snapshots as templates | Custom image from the boot disk, only while the VM is shut off; images stay in one project and region |
| Stopped machines | A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk | No compute charge when stopped, but the OS disk is billed until the VM is deleted |
| Desktop and computer use | 60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control | None; install and stream a desktop yourself |
| Coding agents | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API | None; an MCP server lets an assistant query and inspect your Crusoe infrastructure |
| Keeping keys out of the machine | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out | No credentials proxy; secrets live on the VM as files or variables |
| Reaching the machine | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 | Public IPv4, static or dynamic; SSH; TCP and UDP load balancers; no managed HTTPS URLs |
| Network rules | Open internet on every plan; no provider-side allowlist | VPC firewall with allow rules by IP, port and protocol, in and out |
| GPUs | None | Nvidia and AMD GPU VMs, on-demand, spot or reserved |
| Regions | EU only: Germany, Finland, France | US and EU (Iceland, Norway) |
| Scaling up | Self-serve plans with published sandbox counts and start rates | Per-project quotas; raise them through support |
| Compliance and transparency | SOC 2 is in progress. We're open about where we stand: live status and data retention policy. | SOC 2 |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | boat | Crusoe |
|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | No |
| Root | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Yes | Not published |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No |
| Browser | Yes | No |
| Computer-use API | Yes | No |
| SSH | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | No |
| Fork/clone | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No |
| Memory fork | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | No |
| Wake on request | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | No |
| Raw TCP inbound | Yes | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | Yes |
| Egress allowlist | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | No |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | No |
| Agent harness API | Yes | No |
| MCP server | No | Yes |
| GPU | No | Yes |
| Windows | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | Yes |
| Self-hosting | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No |
| Open source | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Not published |
| Spend limits | Yes | No |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | No | Yes |
| SSO | No | Yes |
| SOC 2 | No | Yes |
| HIPAA | No | Yes |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Yes | Not published |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for Crusoe: it was not in the StarSling hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run we use. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that run, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) hosts. Crusoe's general-purpose CPU VMs run on AMD Genoa or Turin processors.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Crusoe has no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | boat, a month | Crusoe, a month |
|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $20 · $20/mo | $32 · On-demand |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $26 · $20/mo | $121 · On-demand |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats | $1,488 · On-demand |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats | $405 · On-demand |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits | $811 · On-demand |
boat: You pick a monthly plan from $20, and all of it becomes usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Crusoe: Crusoe bills each VM per second while it runs, at a flat rate per vCPU that includes 4 GB of memory per vCPU, and every VM also pays for a 128 GB OS disk each month, running or stopped. It has no plan fee and does not charge for data transfer today; reservations are cheaper but bill for the whole term.
Limits in those scenarios
Crusoe sells CPU VMs in fixed shapes with 4 GB of memory per vCPU, so the 4 vCPU rows use its 16 GB machine against boat's 8 GB sandbox. It publishes no default quotas: each project has its own CPU and GPU limits, and you ask support to raise them, so 50 agents or 300 user sandboxes may need a ticket first. On boat the limit is a sandbox count (100 to 2,000 by plan) plus starts per minute, which is why 1,000 short jobs at once get queued and need more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows. A new Crusoe VM can also spend up to a minute being created before it boots.
| Scenario | boat | Crusoe |
|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays | None that bite | None that bite |
| One agent that never stops | None that bite | None that bite |
| 50 agents in parallel | None that bite | None that bite |
| Sandboxes for your users | None that bite | None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
| None that bite |
Which one should you use?
Use Crusoe when
your agents need GPUs to train or serve models, must run in the US, or are really cluster jobs that need large VMs, Kubernetes or Slurm.
- GPUs for training and inference. If your agents train, fine-tune or serve models, Crusoe rents Nvidia and AMD GPUs from L40S up to GB200.
- US regions and network control. Crusoe runs in the US and the EU, with VPC firewall rules for traffic in and out and static public IPs.
- Big machines and cluster tools. For large CPU or storage-heavy jobs, Crusoe offers far bigger VMs, shared disks, managed Kubernetes and Slurm.
Use boat when
your agents need a ready machine for real work: a full VM that saves itself every minute, forks while running, and comes with a desktop, coding agents, HTTPS hosting and a keys proxy.
- Work that saves itself and forks live. An agent that breaks its machine at minute 50 loses nothing on boat. On Crusoe you would stop the VM, image it and boot a copy to branch, which halts the agent and its work in progress every time.
- A desktop and coding agents inside. On Crusoe you build the desktop stream, install each agent and write the code that starts, prompts and watches it, then keep all of that working across image updates. That is a product to maintain before your agents do any work.
- Hosting and keys handled for you. Code an agent wrote can read any key stored on its own machine. On Crusoe, keeping keys out and putting a preview behind HTTPS means running your own proxy, certificates and auth for every VM.
Questions people ask
Is boat cheaper than Crusoe?
For agent sandboxes, yes in four of the five scenarios we priced: one coding agent on workdays comes to $20 a month on boat and $32 on Crusoe, one agent running all month to $26 versus $121, and 50 agents in parallel to $317 versus $1,488. For 1,000 short jobs at once, Crusoe comes to $811 and fits, while boat lands at $2,000 and hits its start limits.
Is Crusoe a sandbox for AI agents?
No. Crusoe is a GPU cloud that also rents CPU VMs. You get a plain Ubuntu VM with SSH and install everything yourself, with no desktop, built-in agents, credentials proxy or live forks.
Does boat have GPUs like Crusoe?
No. boat runs Linux VMs on AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts and has no GPUs. If your agents train or serve models, run that part on Crusoe or another GPU cloud and keep the agent's workspace on boat.
Can I fork or snapshot a Crusoe VM?
Only by stopping it and making a custom image of its boot disk, which you can then boot new VMs from in the same project and region. There are no snapshots of running VMs or data disks. boat snapshots every minute and can fork a sandbox while it runs.
Where does my data run?
boat runs only in the EU (Germany, Finland and France), with EU data residency and a zero data retention option. Crusoe runs in the US (Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada) and in Iceland and Norway.
Is boat SOC 2 compliant?
SOC 2 is in progress. We're open about where we stand: live status at status.ascii.dev and our data retention policy at docs.boat.dev/data-retention. Crusoe's trust center lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO/IEC 42001.
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