boxd

boxd is a cloud Linux VM service hosted in Europe. Each machine is a microVM with its own kernel, a persistent disk and an HTTPS address, and the site quotes a start time under 10 milliseconds. We found it in a WeChat Channels video from the account 「AI摸鱼局」 on October 6 that promised a Linux VM in 60 seconds that sleeps when idle and wakes on traffic; every number below was checked against boxd’s site and docs.

Core Purpose

The usual way to get a disposable Linux box is to rent a cloud VM, wait for it to boot, configure SSH, install your tools and remember to shut it down. boxd treats machines as cheap and throwaway. The docs’ create example prints boot: 6ms, and boxd machine fork copies a running machine, memory and processes included, in about 160 ms.

Three things set it apart from a plain cloud VM or a container sandbox:

• Forking. A web server that was listening is still listening in the copy, dependencies are installed and the database is warm. To try something risky, fork it, break the fork and delete it; the original never moves.
• Snapshots. Save a machine with its tools installed and its app running, then start many machines from it. Each one wakes into that running state.
• Sleep states. A machine is running, in standby or hibernated. Standby freezes memory in RAM and wakes in under a millisecond; hibernation writes memory to disk, wakes in about 85 ms (boxd’s figure) and is nearly free.

Compared with VibeKit, which wraps a coding agent in a local Docker sandbox, boxd moves the whole machine to the cloud and isolates it with a separate kernel rather than a shared one. The cost is that you pay for it and your data lives there.

Key Scenarios

1. Running coding agents: one machine per agent, so Claude Code or Codex finds its state where it left it, even with your laptop closed.
2. Per-PR preview environments: start from one snapshot and a reviewer opens a link instead of pulling a branch.
3. Running untrusted code: a September 28 boxd post describes keeping only a dummy key (bxds_ plus 32 hex characters) in the machine and swapping in the real one as traffic leaves. It needs an egress policy configured first.
4. Trying several approaches at once: fork three copies from the same state and compare the results.

Trying it and its limits

Four commands get you from nothing to a shell:

curl -fsSL https://boxd.sh/downloads/install.sh | sh
boxd auth login
boxd new myapp
ssh myapp.boxd

The machine comes with a public HTTPS address at myapp.boxd.sh. The video says 60 seconds, a figure the docs never state. We didn’t time it, and the flow is those four steps. TypeScript and Python SDKs exist for creating machines from code.

Limits to know before you commit:

• Auto-suspend is off by default. The docs say to turn it on with something like boxd machine config set <name> auto-suspend.timeout 300. Auto-hibernate is on by default and fires after 4 hours without inbound traffic.
• Pricing. New accounts get €30 in credits, then the rate card is €0.049 per vCPU-hour, €0.015 per GiB-hour of RAM in use and €0.0001 per GiB-hour of disk written. boxd estimates a default 2 vCPU / 8 GiB machine at about €0.13 to €0.22 an hour while running, excluding VAT.
• Europe only. The docs banner warns that US traffic crosses the Atlantic, and a US region is listed as coming soon.
• Quotas. A new organization without a payment method is capped at 2 machines; with a card the default is 50, and the largest single machine is 4 vCPU / 16 GiB.
• A young company. boxd announced a €2 million pre-seed round led by BlueYard Capital on September 16, so plan an exit path before depending on it in production. Running it on your own KVM hosts is offered under the custom plan, not the pay-as-you-go one.