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Launch HN: Agent37 (YC F26) – Low-cost agent sandboxes for running agents

Congrats on the launch. What's your turn around time to sign a BAA?
Congrats on the launch! Very exciting!

You guys are operating in a very competitive space. This stuff is fun to build, so a lot of engineers will end up building it. Not to discourage you, but I suspect it will be difficult to capture much value selling this offering as its going to be race to the bottom against very well funded alternatives that can sell these features at a loss in order to get you to use their databases and other offerings that are higher margin and stickier.

As you guys learn more about how to take this sort of technology to market, you may consider trying to get closer to the actual work that people actually need these agents to do. What can you do better because you have this technology? For example, I work in healthcare administration and we have built our own agent sandbox infrastructure on top of firecracker microvms that solve similar use cases as Agent37. We will never sell it. It's part of our competitive advantage for doing healthcare tasks.

Food for thought! Good luck!

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I've been looking at offloading local work from my MacBook Pro (M1 Pro / 32 GB) specifically because I've been working with a lot of Android apps and emulation is killing me on top of everything else that I'm running.

Got a bunch of Daytona credits which are close to useless given their restrictions until you hit tier 3.

You seem like you're actually slightly cheaper than https://boat.dev/ but with less storage? That's the closest to your pricing unless I'm mistaken. Any other insight as to differences between you two?

Also I'll add you to a list I've been maintaining of sandbox providers, congrats on the launch!

https://engine.build/lab/agent-sandboxes

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Sandboxes look a bit commoditized. You cannot 10x on basically what's just a VM with a few agent-friendly features in 2026. Hence competing on purely price as a new startup is a bad idea imo. As you mentioned hyperscalers have insane margins, but if this turns out to be a real market, they will lower cost, even just eat the loss if they want and take you out of business. Without any hardware innovation, it's tough for me to see this working. If you are going with a customization angle, again, no moat and plenty of competitors
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congrats on the launch.

i think the sandbox part is getting commoditized, like others said. the harder part is what the agent can touch inside it.

you connect google, the agent gets access to everything. sandbox protects the host. it does not protect your tokens.

scoped, short lived credentials per task. that i would pay more for. is it on your roadmap?

Tangentially, I've been investigating the last few days on how to setup a separate Linux box as an agent "playground". I got a mac mini to use as my own personal driver and now my Linux box is free, so I want to have a local setup where I keep my personal machine a bit stricter while giving near free-reign for agents on the Linux machine.

It is like a locally-hosted version of these commercial projects. But I'm doing it ad-hoc. This seems like a space that should be filled by open source. What are the options that exist now? I have pro plans for both Codex and Claude Code and enough credits to run a couple instances of each. I want to control them from the mac mini over a tailnet. What options exists now?

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How do cronjobs work? IE: If I ask an agent to setup a cronjob to check on my email once a day, how does the sandbox behave?

Does it have a layer that intercepts Cronjob creation, and setups up a reminder on the supervisor to wake the VM to run the agent job?

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I have been using your service for a few months… super easy to set up and use. I signed up after my bank would not let me process a payment to Hetzner :)

My use case was to play around with hermes. I was using it for a while but I didn’t like how it ended up (the whole set up became overran with files and was a mess, my fault).

I still haven’t 100% figured out how I may want to use the service again, but I thought it was super easy to set up.

My only feedback is that some connectors for google’s integration were kind of privacy nightmare the last time I checked.

Google’s API for using AI has abominable UI and set up.

It would be nice to be able to bridge the gap of simplifying Google’s AI/Service integration while not having to hand over access to every Google service I use.

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Pretty cool, trying it out. What LLM is it using in the free tier? I was surprised that it worked without supplying an API key. The model doesn't seem to know either: "This run is labeled agent37/default. That’s the configured model name I can see; it doesn’t reveal which underlying model/provider it maps to.".
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This is cool; pricing is certainly appealing. At the same time, there are a ton of sandboxing providers.

> When you look at agent harnesses, ... CPU/RAM utilization we could lower the cost.

How does it work today? Is the harness (assuming it means the agentic loop) located in a separate VM and each loop-run invokes a separate sandboxing VM?

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I have yet to use sandboxes though have some experimentation planned for a new gig I'm starting in a week.

How would you compare what you do to fly.io's Sprites (which is currently atop my To Try list)?

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I had ran into another yc startup from the same batch doing the same thing recently. I think it was called maritime.

YC batch are becoming more like hunger games.

I know a few companies where this is just a feature like digitalocean it is just a feature.

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This is freaking great. Thank you for posting!
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Just use EC2 t4g.nano
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Hi, Vishnu, congrats on the launch.

There is another even cheaper sandbox which is in YC (boat.dev)

How do you compare to them and how are you cheaper then they are?

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