box

box — Persistent Linux VMs with SSH, per-VM IPv4 and disk-level forking, priced flat. box sells persistent Linux VMs you SSH into, with Docker running inside the guest, a dedicated IPv4 per VM, disk-level forking and a flat price. It is also the author of the capability table this row is transcribed from, published at box.ascii.dev/compare. toolweight has not independently verified any of it, so every cell here is either the vendor's own claim or explicitly unknown — there are no toolweight measurements on this row. Built by ASCII.

We track it in 1 comparison — Sandbox providers — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 19 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it gives ground.

• Meter — subscription, 15th of 19. Cloudflare Sandbox records per-10ms.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

A caveat on the data. Only 7 of the 26 fields we track for box carry a value, so treat this profile as partial — an absent red flag is not evidence that there isn't one. Last verified 2026-07-23. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is ascii, and on the fields we score the two are close to indistinguishable — nothing we record separates them by enough to call. If you are choosing between them, the deciding factor is not in this table. Compare them properly.

Company

ASCII

Fields we track

7 of 26

Last verified

2026-07-23

Read this row as a vendor's self-assessment, because that is what it is: every cell comes from the comparison table box publishes on its own site, and toolweight has measured nothing. Taken on its own terms the shape is coherent and unusual here — a long-lived VM with SSH, Docker, a routable IPv4 and a flat bill, rather than an ephemeral per-second sandbox — and the table is notably candid about what box lacks, conceding process fork and sub-500 ms boots to E2B, Modal, Daytona and Blaxel. Two of its louder claims earn nothing here, though: "runs 24/7" is not a published runtime ceiling and "1000+ concurrent VMs ergonomically" is not a published quota, so both cells are unknown rather than scored at this page's maximum. What is missing is everything a buyer would check it against: no isolation technology, no measured boot time, no comparable hourly rate.

Meter

subscription15th of 19

Inferredverified 2026-07-23source

Root in guest

●Yes1st of 20

Inferredverified 2026-07-23source

Custom images

◐Partial14th of 20

Inferredverified 2026-07-23source

Preview URLs

◐Partial13th of 19

Inferredverified 2026-07-23source

Snapshot & fork

◐Partial6th of 18

Inferredverified 2026-07-23source

File up/download

◐Partial10th of 19

Inferredverified 2026-07-23source

box is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• You want a VM that stays up rather than a sandbox that vanishes.
• SSH, Docker and a real network stack matter more than an SDK.
• You are willing to test the vendor's claims yourself before committing.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Meter. box records subscription, 15th of 19 in the Sandbox providers roster. Cloudflare Sandbox records per-10ms on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 19 of the 26 fields we track for box are still blank: Cold start, Cold start (claimed), Isolation, Egress control, Max runtime, Persistent FS, GPU and Runtimes, and 11 more. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.