You can’t compare these with regular VM of aws or gcp. VM are expected to boot up in milliseconds and can be stopped/killed in milliseconds. You are charged per second of usage. The sandboxes are ephemeral and meant for AI coding agents. Typical sandboxes run less than 30 mins session. The premium is for the flexibility it comes with.

I think you can absolutely compare them and there is no added flexibility, in fact there is less flexibility. There is added convenience though.

For the huge factor in price difference you can keep spare spot VMs on GCP idle and warm all the time and still be an order of magnitude cheaper. You have more features and flexibility with these. You can also discard them at will, they are not charged per month. Pricing granularity in GCP is per second (with 1min minimum) and you can fire up firecracker VMs within milliseconds as another commenter pointed out.

Cloudflare Sandbox have less functionality at a significantly increased price. The tradeoff is simplicity because they are more focused for a specific use case for which they don't need additional configuration or tooling. The downside is that they can't do everything a proper VM can do.

It's a fair tradeoff but I argue the price difference is very much out of balance. But then again it seems to be a feature primarily going after AI companies and there is infinite VC money to burn at the moment.

Serously, what flexibility?

I coud easily spin-up a firecracker VM on-demand and put it behind an API. It boots up in under 200 milliseconds. and I get to control it however I wish to. And also, all costs are under my control.

I compared the costs with instances purchased from Hetzner or Contabo here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45613653

Bottomline: by doing this small stuff myself, I can save 35 times more.

In my case, it is ignorance. I am not familiar with how to wield firecracker VMs and manage their lifecycle without putting a hole in my pocket. These sandbox services(e2b, Daytona, Vercel, etc.) package them in an intuitive SDK for me to consume in my application. Since the sandboxing is not the main differentiator for me, I am okay to leverage the external providers to fill in for me. That said, I will be grateful if you can point me to right resources on how to do this myself :)

This is a pretty good use-case for an open-source project then.

For guide, just follow their official docs. I did those again today, literally copy-pasted shell commands one after the other, and voila.. had firecracker vm running and booting a full-fledge ubuntu vm.

It was sooo damn fast that when it started, at that moment I thought that my terminal had crashed because it's prompt changed. But nop. It was just that fast that even while literally looking at it I was not able to catch when it actually did boot-up.

By the way, two open-source projects already exist:

1. NodeJS: https://github.com/apocas/firecrackerode

2. Python: https://github.com/Okeso/python-firecracker

Lol.. a full-fledged project just launched on Github using firecracker and giving cli/api interfaces: https://github.com/Katakate/k7

It doesn't really make sense to compare this to regular VM pricing I think.

This is a on-demand managed container service with a convenient API, logging, global placement in 300+ locations, ...

AWS Lambda is probably closer in terms of product match. (sans the autoscaling)

Depending on what you do , Sandbox could be roughly on par with Lambda, or considerably cheaper.

The 1TB of included egress alone would be like 90$ on AWS.

Of course on lambda you pay per request. But you also apparently pay for Cloudflare Worker requests with Sandbox...

I reckon ... it's complicated.

Startups would build on big tech, so are likely to add their margins. Have you looked into (bulk) discounts from GCP/AWS?