Fly.io sprites is the most similar to us of the bunch. They do hardware virtualization as well, have comparable start times and are full Linux. What we call snapshots they call checkpoints.

The big pros of Sprites over us is their advanced networking stack and the Fly.io ecosystem. The big cons are that Sprites are incredibly bare bones — they don't have any templating utilities. I've also heard that Sprites sometimes become unavailable for extended periods of time.

The big pros of Freestyle over Sprites is fork, advanced templating, and IMO a better debugging experience because of our structure.

▲

knowsuchagency 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm predominantly a self-hoster, but I think your product makes a lot of sense for a wide variety of users and businesses. I'm excited to try out freestyle!

▲

benswerd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Self hosting can be doable for constant small/medium size workloads

You can handroll a lot with: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox?tab=readme-ov-file https://gvisor.dev https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap?tab=readme-ov-file

For hardware virtualized machines it much harder but you can do it via: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/ https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor

Freestyle/other providers will likely provide better debugging experience but thats something you can probably get past for a lot of workloads.

The time when you/anyone should think about Freestyle/anyone is when the load spikes/the need to create hundreds of VMs in short spikes shows up, or when you're looking for some of the more complex feature sets any given provider has built out (forks, GPUs, network boundaries, etc).

I also highly recommend self hosting anything you do outside of your normal VPC. Sandboxes are the biggest possible attack surface and it is a feature of us that we're not in your cloud; If we mess up security your app is still fine.

	▲	indigodaddy 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is what I do (my project) for self hosting on a VPS/server: https://GitHub.com/jgbrwn/vibebin Also I'm a huge proponent of exe.dev Obviously your service/approach is different than exe, more like sprites but like you said more targeted/opinionated to AI coding/sandboxing tasks it looks like. Interesting space for sure!

▲

sahil-shubham 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been building an open-source, self-hostable Firecracker orchestrator for the past month: https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti (https://bhatti.sh)

Still WIP, but the core works — three rootfs tiers (minimal Ubuntu, headless Chromium with CDP, Docker-in-VM), OCI image support (pull any Docker image), automatic thermal management (idle VMs pause then snapshot to disk, wake transparently on next API call), per-user bridge networking with L2 isolation, named checkpoints, persistent volumes, and preview URLs with auto-wake.

Fair warning: the website is too technical and the docs are mostly AI-generated, both being actively reworked. But I've been running it daily on a Hetzner server for my AI agents' browser automation, and deploy previews.

I'd love any feedback if you want to go ahead and try it yourself

▲

0123456789ABCDE 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

sprites have weird lately, i think fly.io is having trouble with capacity in various locations.

is the experience similar? can i just get console to one machine, work for a bit, logout. come back later, continue?

how does i cost work if i log into a machine and do nothing on it? just hold the connection.

▲

benswerd 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This will just work on us.

We do auto suspend depending on your configured timeout. We'll pause your VM and when you come back the processes will be in the exact same state as when you left.

	▲	tomComb an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But your pricing page suggests that that is not available without a subscription: in the on-demand pricing section "persistent Snapshots" and "Persistent VM's" have an 'x'.