Railway vs Instabox
Railway is an app platform whose sandbox VMs sit next to your services and are destroyed after an idle timeout. Instabox, which launched today as an invite-only beta, gives each agent one fixed-size Firecracker VM that pauses with its memory, with at most 5 machines per account.
The companies and products
Railway
Railway is a cloud platform for deploying web apps, servers and databases, which now also sells sandboxes and cloud agents.
Railway's main product is app hosting: you deploy services and databases as containers on its own hardware. In 2026 it added Sandboxes, isolated Linux VMs you create from the CLI or a TypeScript SDK, run commands in and destroy, and Cloud Agents, a personal VM for running a coding agent, in early access. It suits teams already hosting on Railway who want throwaway machines next to their apps.
Instabox
Instabox, made by InsForge, gives each AI agent its own Linux computer in the cloud. It launched on 2026-10-14 as an invite-only beta.
Each Instabox machine is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, root and Docker, started from one of four templates (agent-browser, universal, herdr or orca) or from your own snapshot. Every machine is 4 vCPU / 8 GiB with 20 GB of storage, and you drive it from a CLI, a TypeScript SDK or an HTTP API, with SSH, mosh, public port URLs and a desktop for computer use. It is aimed at developers who want a cloud box for a coding agent.
- Isolation
- Firecracker microVM per machine
- Machines per account
- 5, in any state: paused and stopped ones count
- Company
- InsForge AI, Inc.
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. “16th cheapest of 366” means 15 of the other 365 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 | Railway: price rank | Instabox: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A software factory reuses set-up machines: Railway forks a running sandbox but destroys idle ones, Instabox forks only stopped machines, and boat forks running sandboxes that keep their disk. | 51st of 367, with limits $342 a month | No published price | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An always-on assistant needs Railway's idle timeout set to 0 or a Cloud Agent, while Instabox needs its 30-minute idle pause turned off. | 16th cheapest of 366 $3,977 a month | No published price | 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 Railway suits short code runs because it bills for CPU used and destroys the sandbox after; Instabox caps API exec calls at 10 minutes, 4 at once. | 36th cheapest of 345 $413 a month | No published price | 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 Instabox allows 5 machines per account, paused and stopped ones included, so it cannot give a sandbox to each of many users; Railway allows 100 per environment on Pro. | 42nd of 361, with limits $290 a month | No published price | 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 | 78th of 360, with limits $4,450 a month | No published price | 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 Railway can boot many sandboxes from one checkpoint up to its per-environment cap, while Instabox's 5-machine cap limits how many evals run at once. | 108th of 364, with limits $364 a month | No published price | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month CI jobs that build containers need Docker, which Instabox and boat document and Railway's sandbox docs do not mention. | 113th cheapest of 377 $1,210 a month | No published price | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Railway's Cloud Agents are early access and fixed at 4 vCPU / 4 GB on Pro; Instabox offers SSH with mosh on one 4 vCPU / 8 GiB size. | 66th cheapest of 368 $89 a month | No published price | 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 Railway sandboxes are headless, while Instabox has a desktop with screenshot and click control on one template and boat streams a 60fps desktop. | 77th of 369, with limits $103 a month | No published price | 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 | 53rd of 367, with limits $93 a month | No published price | 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 | 60th cheapest of 346 $570 a month | No published price | 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 | 109th of 338, with limits $2,988 a month | No published price | 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 | 43rd of 360, with limits $574 a month | No published price | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month | Can't run it | No published price | 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 | No published price | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Railway | Instabox | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Sandboxes are isolated Linux VMs; app services are containers | Firecracker microVM with its own kernel and root | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| When the machine goes idle | Destroyed after the idle timeout (30 minutes by default); files survive only in checkpoints you take | Paused after 30 idle minutes with memory and running programs kept; you can change or turn this off | You stop it; the disk is kept, saved every minute and on stop, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Machine sizes | Up to 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Hobby and 32 vCPU / 32 GB on Pro | One size for everyone: 4 vCPU / 8 GiB with 20 GB storage | Several sizes, up to 8 vCPU / 16 GB on the $20 plan and 16 vCPU / 32 GB from $100 |
| Machines at once | 50 per environment on Hobby, 100 on Pro; Enterprise can ask for more | 5 per account, paused and stopped ones included | 100 to 2,000 by plan |
| Docker and nested virtualization | Root shell on Ubuntu; the sandbox docs do not mention Docker or /dev/kvm | Docker and Docker Compose run inside; nested virtualization is not documented | Docker, root, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Fork | Fork a running sandbox's filesystem | Fork copies a stopped machine only | Fork a running sandbox with its disk |
| Snapshots and checkpoints | Named disk checkpoints you take by hand to boot new sandboxes | Up to 10, saved by hand; saving stops a running machine first unless the server allows a live save | Disk saved every minute and on stop, plus named snapshots of running sandboxes |
| Public port URLs | Up to 10 public HTTPS domains, set only at creation | HTTPS on up to 16 ports, open to anyone with the URL; offline while the machine is paused | HTTPS on up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP too |
| SSH | SSH and port forwarding | SSH through a gateway with short-lived certificates, paste-anywhere SSH tokens and mosh | SSH into every sandbox |
| Desktop and computer use | Headless: terminal, exec and SSH only | Linux desktop with a browser on one template, screenshot and click API, shareable view or control links | 60fps Linux desktop with Chromium and a computer-use agent, embeddable stream |
| Coding agents | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Pi preinstalled; you run them headless through exec | Templates and saved agent sign-ins in snapshots; you run the agent yourself | Seven agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Secrets are set in the sandbox as environment variables | Vault writes your secrets into each machine as environment variables or files | Credentials proxy: real keys never enter the sandbox, for model providers and any HTTPS API |
| Apps and databases next to the sandbox | Deploy Postgres, Redis and services in the same project; a sandbox can join their private network | Not documented | No hosted databases or app services; host your own inside a sandbox |
| Regions | US West, US East, Amsterdam and Singapore | Not published | EU only: Germany, Finland, France |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Railway | Instabox | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | Not published | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | Yes | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | Yes | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | Not published | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | No | Not published | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Not published | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | Not published | No |
| Self-hosting | No | Not published | No |
| BYOC | Yes | Not published | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Spend limits | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | Not published | No |
| SSO | Yes | No | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Not published | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | Not published | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for Railway or Instabox: neither has a result in StarSling's hpc-sandbox-benchmarks, so this page makes no speed claim between them. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that benchmark. Instabox says a new machine's shell is ready in under a second; that has not been measured.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Railway and Instabox 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 | Railway, a month | Instabox, 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 | $16 · Hobby · with limits | No published price | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $70 · Hobby · with limits | No published price | $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 | $739 · Hobby · with limits | No published price | $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 | $223 · Pro · with limits | No published price | $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 | $781 · Pro · with limits | No published price | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Railway: Railway bills sandboxes per second at $50 per vCPU-month on CPU actually used and $50 per GB-month on memory in use, plus $0.05 per GB out, and memory keeps billing while a sandbox waits. The Hobby ($5) and Pro ($20 per workspace) fees count toward usage, and sandbox disk has no published price.
Instabox: Instabox is free during the beta, with 5 machines per user, and has no published price, so no bill can be compared yet.
Instabox: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Railway is marked as not a clean fit in every scenario because it is an app platform first and does not price sandbox disk, and its cap of 100 sandboxes per environment on Pro is below 300 user sandboxes or 1,000 jobs at once. Instabox publishes no rate, so none of its scenarios can be priced, and its 5-machine cap rules out the 50-agent and user-sandbox scenarios today. On boat, the 1,000-job burst is queued above 90 starts a minute and needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows.
| Scenario | Railway | Instabox | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays |
|
| None that bite |
| One agent that never stops |
|
| 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 Railway when
your app and databases already live on Railway, you want short-lived sandboxes on the same private network, or you need bigger machines or US and Asia regions.
- Your apps and databases in one place. Useful if your app already runs on Railway: sandboxes can join the same private network as your Postgres and services.
- Bigger machines and more of them. Useful for heavy builds or many agents: up to 32 vCPU / 32 GB on Pro and 100 sandboxes per environment.
- Regions in the US, EU and Asia. Useful if your users are spread out: Railway runs in California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore.
Use Instabox when
you want to try a few free 4 vCPU / 8 GiB agent machines during its beta, with Docker, memory pause and mosh.
- Free during the beta. Useful for trying things out: every account can run 5 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GiB for free while the beta lasts.
- Pause with memory. Useful for agents that wait: a paused machine keeps its running programs and usually resumes in about a second.
- Docker, a desktop and mosh. Useful for a single agent box: Docker runs inside, one template has a desktop, and SSH works with mosh.
Where boat fits
If your agents work for hours or days, look at boat. Railway destroys idle sandboxes and has no desktop, and Instabox caps you at 5 machines of one size with public port URLs and no published terms. boat gives each agent a full VM that keeps its disk, with Docker, /dev/kvm, a desktop and coding agents you drive from outside.
Work that survives a pause
A Railway sandbox past its idle timeout is destroyed with its installs, unless you set the timeout to 0 and pay for memory the whole time. On Instabox, saving a snapshot or forking stops the machine first. boat saves the disk every minute and forks running sandboxes.
Private URLs and keys kept outside
Instabox port URLs are open to anyone who has them, and both Railway and Instabox put your API keys inside the machine where agent code can read them. boat's port URLs carry a token, and its credentials proxy keeps real keys outside.
A fleet with a desktop and KVM
Railway sandboxes are headless and Instabox stops at 5 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GiB. boat runs 100 to 2,000 sandboxes by plan, up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB, each with a 60fps desktop, Docker and /dev/kvm.
Use boat when your agents work for hours or days: a full VM that keeps its disk and forks while running, with Docker, a desktop, private port URLs and coding agents you drive from outside. Compare it one to one: boat vs Railway and boat vs Instabox.
Questions people ask
Is Railway cheaper than Instabox?
It can't be compared yet. Instabox is free during its beta and publishes no price, so there is no bill to set against Railway's. Railway bills per second for CPU used and memory in use.
Which is faster, Railway or Instabox?
We don't know: neither has been measured in the benchmark we use. Instabox says a new machine's shell is ready in under a second, and its docs say a paused machine usually resumes in about a second. boat did 26.69 runs per second in that benchmark.
Can Railway or Instabox run Docker?
Instabox's docs say Docker and Docker Compose run inside each machine. Railway's sandbox docs do not mention Docker. boat runs Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine.
What happens when a sandbox goes idle?
Railway destroys it after the idle timeout, 30 minutes by default, so you keep files by taking a checkpoint first. Instabox pauses it after 30 idle minutes and keeps its memory, but its port URLs go offline while paused. boat stops it and keeps the disk.
How many machines can I run at once?
Railway allows 50 sandboxes per environment on Hobby and 100 on Pro. Instabox allows 5 per account, paused and stopped ones included. boat allows 100 to 2,000 by plan.
Where do Railway and Instabox run?
Railway has regions in California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore. Instabox does not publish its regions. boat runs only in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France.
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