box by ASCII

box is a cloud sandbox product by ASCII, designed specifically for AI agents and agent factories. Each box is a persistent Ubuntu virtual machine with SSH and SCP access, Docker support, a dedicated IPv4 address, a 60fps virtual desktop, and fast disk-level forking from snapshots. It is built for programmatic use by AI agents as well as direct human use.

What It Is

box provides on-demand Linux VMs that function as isolated, fully capable sandboxes. Unlike lightweight container-based sandboxes, each box is a full Ubuntu machine — meaning any devtool, language runtime, or workflow can run inside it. The product is positioned as infrastructure for "agent factories": systems that spin up many boxes programmatically to run AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode.

Pre-Configured Environment

Every box ships with a curated set of tools pre-installed so agents and developers can start working immediately:

• Docker — container support inside the VM
• VS Code — editor available out of the box
• Chrome — browser for web automation tasks
• Ghostty — terminal emulator
• GitHub CLI — for repository operations
• Rust, Node.js, Bun — language runtimes

Because boxes are full Ubuntu machines, any additional tool, language, or service can be installed on top of this baseline.

CLI and API Design

box is operated through a CLI built to be friendly to both agents and humans. Key commands include:

• box new — spin up a new box
• box ssh / box scp — SSH and SCP access
• box prompt — run Claude or Codex inside the box
• box fork — clone a box from a snapshot
• box stop — snapshot the box and pause billing
• box desktop — open the 60fps virtual desktop
• box list — list all active boxes

For programmatic use, box also exposes an HTTP API and Python and TypeScript SDKs. The CLI supports --json on any command for stable JSONL output when shell integration is the fastest path.

Deployment and Availability

Boxes currently run in EU regions: Germany, Finland, and France. Data and snapshots remain in the EU. Self-serve accounts scale from 100 to 1,200 active boxes; higher limits are available by agreement. The default box TTL is 1 hour and is overrideable. Stopping a box snapshots its state — files, installed packages, and enabled systemd services survive stop/resume cycles.

Billing Model

box uses per-second billing with a monthly account minimum. The site states that the minimum converts into a fixed number of VM-seconds (approximately 555 hours) of dedicated 4 vCPU / 8 GB VM time, spendable across one box or many. Boxes are not billed while stopped. The pricing page for the parent ASCII product also lists separate plans for the ASCII CTO agent built on top of box infrastructure.

Why It Matters for Agent Workflows

The core design insight behind box is that AI coding agents need cheap, disposable, fully capable Linux environments they can spin up and tear down programmatically. Features like disk-level snapshot forking (for cloning a configured state across many parallel agents), per-second billing (so idle boxes don't accumulate cost), and a built-in virtual desktop (for browser-based tasks) address specific pain points in agentic pipelines. The site explicitly compares box against E2B, GitHub Codespaces, Daytona, Modal, and Vercel Sandbox on affordability.