Hyperstack vs Verda
Hyperstack and Verda are both GPU clouds that also rent plain CPU virtual machines. Hyperstack bills per minute in Norway, Canada and the US and lets you hibernate a VM, while Verda runs only in Helsinki, bills in 10-minute blocks and sells far larger and lower-priced CPU machines.
The companies and products
Hyperstack
Hyperstack is the GPU cloud of NexGen Cloud, a UK company founded in 2020: you rent GPU and CPU virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and storage by the minute.
A Hyperstack VM is a full virtual machine with root and SSH, booted from an Ubuntu image (with or without Docker) and sized from a fixed list of flavors, from one RTX A4000 to 8-GPU B300 nodes, plus CPU-only flavors from 4 to 32 vCPUs. It also runs managed Kubernetes, volumes, object storage and an AI Studio inference API. It is built for teams that train, fine-tune and serve models, not as a sandbox API for agents, so this page compares the parts that overlap: VMs as machines for agent work.
Verda
Verda, called DataCrunch until 2025, is a European AI cloud that rents Nvidia GPUs, CPU machines and GPU clusters.
You create a GPU or CPU instance, add a disk and an SSH key, and get a full Linux VM with root and its own public IP. Verda also sells GPU clusters with InfiniBand and serverless containers that scale to zero for inference. It is built for teams that train, fine-tune and serve AI models, not as a sandbox for agents.
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. “122nd cheapest of 377” means 121 of the other 376 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 | Hyperstack: price rank | Verda: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Both give a coding agent a raw VM to set up yourself, and on both a stopped VM keeps billing, so Verda ranks 88th, Hyperstack 343rd and boat, with free stops and agents built in, ranks 3rd. | 343rd of 367, with limits $11,458 a month | 88th of 367, with limits $788 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB | 337th of 366, with limits $12,775 a month | 133rd of 366, with limits $901 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Verda's serverless containers scale to zero and wake on a request, which suits short bursts; Hyperstack has nothing like that for CPU jobs. | 172nd of 345, with limits $1,167 a month | 99th of 345, with limits $165 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Neither Hyperstack nor Verda has a sandbox API for your users or a published limit on machines at once, so 300 sandboxes at once is not confirmed on either; boat ranks 1st. | 173rd of 361, with limits $4,207 a month | 71st of 361, with limits $629 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month Verda ranks 20th for RL rollouts thanks to its low CPU prices, ahead of boat at 34th and Hyperstack at 173rd. | 173rd of 360, with limits $17,500 a month | 20th of 360, with limits $1,097 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 204th of 364, with limits $3,250 a month | 91st of 364, with limits $123 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month All three fit as CI runners on full VMs; Verda ranks 10th, Hyperstack 122nd and boat 4th. | 122nd cheapest of 377 $1,560 a month | 10th cheapest of 377 $142 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB A dev box that stays on fits all three; Verda's CPU machines are much lower priced than Hyperstack's, and boat ranks 18th. | 115th cheapest of 368 $475 a month | 36th cheapest of 368 $45 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Neither has a built-in desktop: Hyperstack gives SSH and text console logs, Verda a guide to install a VNC server, while boat streams a 60fps desktop with computer use. | 332nd of 369, with limits $3,250 a month | 82nd of 369, with limits $123 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month | 335th of 367, with limits $1,750 a month | 169th of 367, with limits $110 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 327th of 346, with limits $1,750 a month | 184th of 346, with limits $103 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 310th of 338, with limits $35,000 a month | 84th of 338, with limits $2,057 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 309th of 360, with limits $876 a month | 122nd of 360, with limits $66 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month Both fit GPU eval jobs: Hyperstack ranks 2nd at $625 a month and Verda ranks 14th at $1,039 a month, and boat has no GPUs. | 2nd cheapest of 98 $625 a month | 14th cheapest of 98 $1,039 a month | Can't run it |
| 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 | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Hyperstack | Verda | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | GPU cloud: GPU and CPU VMs, managed Kubernetes, volumes, object storage and an inference API | GPU and CPU cloud: VMs, GPU clusters, storage and serverless containers | Sandboxes for AI agents: VMs with coding agents, a desktop and hosting ready |
| Isolation | Full VMs with root, on flavors mapped 1:1 to physical resources | Full VMs on KVM/QEMU, with dedicated AMD EPYC cores on CPU machines | Every sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel |
| Docker | Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 images with or without Docker | Root on your own VM, so you install Docker yourself | Docker, Docker Compose, root, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| GPUs | Nvidia RTX A4000 up to H100, H200, B200 and B300, on demand, spot or reserved | Nvidia V100 up to GB300, on-demand or spot, plus clusters with InfiniBand | None |
| Largest CPU machine | CPU-only flavors up to 32 vCPU / 64 GB (Canada) | CPU instances up to 360 vCPU / 1,440 GB | Up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB, depending on plan |
| Stopping a machine | A stopped VM bills at the full rate; hibernation bills only disk and a kept IP, and a restore needs the flavor in stock | A shut-down instance keeps billing; only Delete stops the charge, and kept volumes bill at $0.20/GiB-month | A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its whole disk |
| Snapshots and fork | Snapshots on request only, with the VM shut off; no clone or fork | Clone a volume once its instance is shut down; no snapshots of a running machine | Disk snapshotted every minute and on stop; fork a running sandbox |
| Desktop and computer use | SSH and text console logs; no graphical desktop | No built-in desktop; a guide to install XFCE and TigerVNC yourself | 60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control, embeddable stream |
| Coding agents | A hosted MCP server lets your own agent manage Hyperstack | An MCP server and CLI agent mode let an outside agent manage Verda machines | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Reaching the machine | A public IPv4 you can keep static; open ports with firewall rules and run your own TLS | A free public IPv4 per instance and SSH; you set up TLS yourself | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Network rules | Cloud firewall per VM: inbound closed by default, outbound rules by IP, protocol and port | You run a firewall such as ufw inside the VM yourself | Open internet out; inbound through HTTPS URLs and TCP ports |
| Keeping keys out of the machine | No credentials proxy; you pass keys in with cloud-init, files or environment variables | Secrets only for serverless containers; on instances you place keys yourself | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API you register |
| Scale to zero | No; a VM runs until you hibernate or delete it | Serverless containers scale to zero when idle and start again on the next request | No wake on request; you start a stopped sandbox through the API |
| Regions | Norway, Canada (Quebec) and the US (Texas) | EU only: three data centers in Helsinki, Finland | EU only: Germany, Finland, France |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Hyperstack | Verda | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | No | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | No | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | No | No |
| Wake on request | No | Yes | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | Yes | Yes | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | No | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | No | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | No |
| GPU | Yes | Yes | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Yes | No |
| SSO | No | No | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | No | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for Hyperstack or Verda: neither is in the public StarSling benchmark run we use, so we cannot say which is faster. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that run of 2026-09-29, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts. Verda says its CPU instances use dedicated AMD EPYC cores clocked at 3.3 GHz.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Hyperstack and Verda have 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 | Hyperstack, a month | Verda, a month | boat, 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 | $114 · Prepaid on-demand | $18 · Pay as you go | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $475 · Prepaid on-demand | $45 · Pay as you go | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $5,720 · Prepaid on-demand | $622 · Pay as you go | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $1,750 · Prepaid on-demand · with limits | $254 · Pay as you go · with limits | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $3,500 · Prepaid on-demand · with limits | $507 · Pay as you go · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Hyperstack: Hyperstack bills a running VM per minute from a prepaid balance, at a fixed hourly price per flavor, with no charge for bandwidth. Its closest CPU flavor in the scenarios is 8 vCPU / 8 GB, and a stopped VM keeps billing, so the totals assume you hibernate it between runs.
Verda: Verda charges a prepaid balance in 10-minute blocks and refunds the unused part when you delete early. CPU machines cost $0.012 per vCPU-hour with 4 GB of RAM each, the disk is extra at $0.20/GiB-month, and its egress price is not published.
Verda: 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 whole disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Neither Hyperstack nor Verda publishes how many machines an account can run at once, so 300 sandboxes for your users or 1,000 short jobs at once are not confirmed on either until you get a higher quota. Both APIs allow 500 requests a minute, and Verda also caps instance creation at 60 a minute. Verda's smallest CPU machine is 4 vCPU / 16 GB and Hyperstack's is 4 vCPU / 4 GB, so neither offers the small 2 vCPU size the scenarios ask for. On boat the 1,000-job burst is queued and needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows.
| Scenario | Hyperstack | Verda | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Sandboxes for your users |
|
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Hyperstack when
you need GPUs or CPU VMs in Canada or the US, want to hibernate idle machines, or need a cloud firewall and managed Kubernetes.
- Regions in North America. Useful if your data or users are in North America: Hyperstack runs regions in Quebec and Texas as well as Norway.
- Hibernation and per-minute billing. Useful if VMs sit idle for days: hibernating bills only the disk and a kept IP, and running time bills per minute.
- Cloud firewall and managed Kubernetes. Useful if you must limit outbound traffic by IP and port, or want managed Kubernetes clusters next to your GPUs.
Use Verda when
you want low-priced CPU machines up to 360 vCPU, GPU clusters with InfiniBand, inference containers that scale to zero, or an EU-only cloud.
- Very large, low-priced CPU machines. Useful for big CPU jobs: Verda CPU instances use dedicated EPYC cores, go up to 360 vCPU, and cost $0.012 per vCPU-hour.
- Containers that scale to zero. Useful for inference endpoints: Verda's serverless containers sleep when idle and wake on the next request.
- GPU clusters with InfiniBand. Useful for multi-node training: Verda sells GPU clusters with InfiniBand between nodes, up to GB300.
Where boat fits
Hyperstack and Verda are GPU clouds, and boat has no GPUs, so model training and GPU evals belong on one of them. If what you are really running is agents that write and run code on CPU machines, both give you a raw VM to set up and keep paying for while it is stopped. boat gives each agent a full VM with its disk saved every minute, free stops, a desktop, HTTPS ports and coding agents built in.
Free stops and a disk saved every minute
Agents sit idle and break things. A stopped Hyperstack VM bills in full unless you hibernate it and hope its flavor is in stock to restore; a shut-down Verda instance bills until you delete it. Neither snapshots a running machine.
A desktop and coding agents on every machine
Hyperstack gives you SSH and Verda a guide to install VNC, and both leave the agent install to you. boat ships a 60fps desktop with Chromium and Claude Code, Codex and others you drive from outside.
HTTPS ports and keys kept off the machine
On both clouds you get a public IP, then set up TLS for every preview and place real API keys on the VM, where agent code can read them. boat serves HTTPS on up to 50 ports and proxies credentials.
Use boat when you run agents on CPU: full VMs with Docker and /dev/kvm, a disk saved every minute, free stops, a desktop, HTTPS ports and coding agents built in. Compare it one to one: boat vs Hyperstack and boat vs Verda.
Questions people ask
Is Hyperstack cheaper than Verda?
Not for CPU work in our scenarios. One coding agent on workdays is $114 a month on Hyperstack and $18 on Verda, one agent running all month is $475 against $45, and 50 agents in parallel are $5,720 against $622. On boat those come to $20, $26 and $317. Hyperstack's closest flavor is 8 vCPU / 8 GB and Verda's is 4 vCPU / 16 GB, so the sizes differ.
Which is faster, Hyperstack or Verda?
We have no comparable CPU measurement for either, so we cannot say. Hyperstack maps its flavors 1:1 to physical resources, and Verda says its CPU machines run on dedicated AMD EPYC cores at 3.3 GHz. boat scored 26.69 runs per second in the StarSling benchmark.
Do stopped VMs cost money on Hyperstack and Verda?
Yes on both. A stopped Hyperstack VM bills at the full rate, but you can hibernate it so only its disk and a kept IP bill. A shut-down Verda instance keeps billing until you delete it, and kept volumes bill at $0.20/GiB-month. A stopped boat sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Can Hyperstack and Verda run Docker?
Yes. Both give you a full VM with root. Hyperstack's Ubuntu images come with or without Docker, and on Verda you install it yourself. boat sandboxes come with Docker, Docker Compose, systemd and /dev/kvm ready.
Which GPUs do Hyperstack and Verda offer?
Hyperstack rents Nvidia GPUs from RTX A4000 to B300, on demand, spot or reserved. Verda rents Nvidia GPUs from V100 to GB300, on-demand or spot, plus clusters with InfiniBand. boat has no GPUs.
Where does my data run?
Hyperstack has regions in Norway, Canada and the US. Verda runs only in Helsinki, Finland. boat runs only in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France, with EU data residency.
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