boat provides persistent Ubuntu sandboxes for long-running agents

boat provides cloud Linux virtual machines for agent work, software development and interactive desktop sessions. The product page describes persistent Ubuntu sandboxes with SSH and SCP access, Docker support and a browser-accessible virtual desktop. ASCII builds the service.

You can run an agent inside a sandbox and control or observe it from outside. This separates the working machine from your local computer while retaining files and an installed development environment between sessions.

Create a machine with the tools already installed

The publisher lists Docker, VS Code, Chrome, Ghostty and the GitHub CLI among the preinstalled tools, alongside Rust, Node.js and Bun. It describes support for agents such as Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode. That compatibility claim does not mean boat includes those services' subscriptions or model usage in its machine pricing.

The CLI exposes commands for creating machines, executing commands and opening SSH or desktop access. Snapshot forking can produce another sandbox from an existing state. For programmatic control, the page directs users to its HTTP API and Python or TypeScript SDKs; JSON output is also available for shell integrations.

Use separate permissions and credentials for the work the machine must perform. The page describes creating user sandboxes without injecting the account's secrets, a useful boundary to verify before exposing a machine to someone else.

Stop billing while preserving a working environment

boat says stopping a sandbox creates a snapshot and pauses billing. On resume, files, installed packages and enabled systemd services survive. Hand-run processes need a restart, so resuming a machine should include a check that the required application or agent is running again.

The default sandbox lifetime is one hour and can be overridden. Set that lifetime and any stop behavior to fit the job, especially for a long agent run that may wait on external input.

Regions listed in the captured page are Germany, Finland and France. The publisher says data and snapshots stay in those EU regions.

Calculate fleet cost from machine time

The page lists a $20 monthly account minimum, billed by the second while sandboxes run. It says $20 buys 2,000,000 VM-seconds, about 555 hours at the default four-vCPU, eight-GB size, spread across one machine or several.

A smaller two-vCPU, four-GB machine uses that time at half the rate, while the eight-vCPU, sixteen-GB size uses twice the rate. Concurrent machines therefore consume the account allowance together. The advertised trial lasts seven days with 25 compute hours.

boat also publishes competitor price and speed comparisons. Those are vendor-run comparisons with specified workloads, not a Franklin reproduction. Estimate your own active machine time and required resources before treating a comparison chart as the cost of your deployment.