CreateOS Sandbox vs Boat
boat is hard to beat on price for bursty coding-agent work if EU-only hosting suits you: flat per-size rates from $0.018/hour, free egress, Docker, a desktop and disk-level fork. CreateOS Sandbox is the choice when a pause must keep memory and processes, when egress rules belong in the API, or when you need a us region or a free plan.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. boat pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.
CreateOS Sandbox
- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
boat
boat charges $0.018/hour for small (2 vCPU, 4 GB), $0.036/hour for default (4 vCPU, 8 GB), $0.072/hour for large (8 vCPU, 16 GB) and $0.200/hour for xlarge (16 vCPU, 32 GB), per second from prepaid monthly plans starting at $20, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where boat has the edge.
Pause saves memory and CPU state; boat has no pause, and stop ends processes while keeping the disk.
Egress allowlists set through the API and enforced on the host; boat has no API setting for network rules.
Two regions, eu and us; boat runs in the EU only.
A Free plan with 500 credits and no card; boat offers a 7-day trial that requires a card.
Where boat is strong
Very low flat per-size prices with free egress, plus a full root VM with Docker, a desktop and fork, make it cheap to keep many agent machines that run in bursts.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- Your agent must resume with processes running after a pause.
- You need US hosting.
- Sandbox code needs outbound limits it cannot change from inside.
Pick boat if
- The lowest flat per-hour price for full VMs matters most.
- You want disk-level fork to a new size, and up to 16 vCPU and 32 GB.
- You need 100 or more sandboxes at once.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.
| Dimension | CreateOS Sandbox | boat |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Full VM (shared vCPUs; hypervisor not named); nested KVM on request |
| Pause and resume | Pause saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill | No pause; stop keeps the disk as a snapshot for 14 days and ends processes |
| Fork | Yes, fork a paused sandbox into many independent copies | Yes, disk-level from the newest snapshot, optionally to a new size |
| Outbound network default | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Open; no API setting for network rules |
| Inbound access | Closed by default; opt-in public HTTPS URL | Public HTTPS URL per port, token-protected by default; SSH; desktop stream |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise; 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Pro | xlarge: 16 vCPU, 32 GB, 251 GB disk |
| Concurrency | 1 / 5 / 20 / 30 by plan; paused sandboxes count toward the cap | 100 to 2,000 by plan; trial 2 |
| Session length | No cap; idle auto-pause 60 s to 24 h, off by default | Auto-stop 1 hour after create or resume by default; extendable or disabled |
| Billing | Per second: $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour, $0.01159025 per GiB-hour, storage $0.0001584 per GB-hour; no egress fees, 50 GiB bandwidth budget per sandbox | Per second, $0.018 to $0.200 per hour by size; egress not billed |
| GPU | No GPU shapes | No |
Common Questions
Does boat keep memory when a sandbox stops?
No. boat has no pause: stopping removes the machine, ends processes and keeps the disk as a snapshot for 14 days, and enabled systemd services restart on resume. A CreateOS Sandbox pause keeps disk, memory and CPU registers.
Where does boat host sandboxes?
In the EU only, across Germany, Finland and France, with no region choice; snapshot copies can be stored outside the EU. CreateOS Sandbox lets you choose the eu or us region when you create a sandbox.
Can I control outbound traffic in boat through the API?
No. boat leaves egress open and has no API setting for network rules; it points to firewall rules inside the sandbox. CreateOS Sandbox egress rules are set through the API and enforced on the host, outside the VM.
Does boat have a free tier?
No. boat offers a 7-day trial with 25 compute hours and requires a card, then prepaid plans from $20/month returned as sandbox time. CreateOS Sandbox has a Free plan with 500 credits and no card required.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.