Agent37 Prices Agent Sandboxes 35 Times Below Modal's Rate Card
Startups / news
Agent37 Prices Agent Sandboxes 35 Times Below Modal's Rate Card
The Y Combinator F26 company is bootstrapped, runs on Hetzner and OVH, and is betting that a sleeping sandbox costs almost nothing to keep.
Agent37, a bootstrapped Y Combinator F26 company, sells a 2 vCPU, 4 GB sandbox for AI agents at $4.94 a month, according to a Launch HN post by its founder. Modal, which said on Oct. 14 that its own sandbox product carries a $300 million annualized run rate, publishes a rate that works out to about $174 a month for the same shape left running.
The Terminal did not run either service. Every figure below comes from the posts and pricing pages linked, and the monthly totals are our arithmetic on those rates.
What Agent37 sells and what it says it costs
The Launch HN post was written by Vishnu, who posts as vishnukool and wrote that he was a senior software engineer at Amazon and an engineering manager at Quantcast. No co-founder is named. He wrote that the sandboxes host agent harnesses such as OpenClaw, Hermes and Claude Code, on Hetzner and OVH servers rather than a hyperscaler, and that servers were first paid for from his savings.
The company's site lists metered prices with no subscription: $0.0011 per vCPU-hour, $0.00096 per GB-hour of memory and $0.00012 per GB-hour of disk. A new account gets a $5 credit once a card is on file. Startups can apply for up to $10,000 in credits.
Sleeping is the pricing idea. Compute stops billing when a sandbox sleeps, so an idle 4 GB sandbox costs about $0.36 a month in disk. The post says the average customer pays $0.37 a month per sandbox and that a free user costs about $0.05 to $0.10 a month in infrastructure.
The halls above are Hetzner's Falkenstein park in 2012, under construction. The post does not name Agent37's sites.
The arithmetic against Modal
Modal's pricing page bills sandboxes at $0.00003942 per physical core per second, where one core equals two vCPU, plus $0.00000667 per GiB of memory per second. For one core and 4 GiB, left running for 730 hours, that is about $174 a month. On Agent37's rate card, the same two vCPU and 4 GB come to about $4.76 a month including a 4 GB disk, slightly under the $4.94 in the post.
| Provider | Source of the rate | 2 vCPU, 4 GB, always on |
|---|---|---|
| Agent37 | Launch HN post | $4.94 a month |
| AWS t4g.medium | Founder's comparison, Launch HN | $24.50 a month |
| Modal | Pricing page, The Terminal's arithmetic | about $174 a month |
- Agent374.94 USD
- AWS t4g.medium24.5 USD
- Modal174 USD
Source: Agent37 Launch HN post; Modal pricing page (The Terminal's arithmetic at 730 hours); accessed 2026-10-17
The comparison flatters Agent37. Modal bills only for seconds used, so a sandbox that runs two hours a day costs a fraction of $174. Modal's pricing page also lists a Team plan at $250 a month plus compute, which Agent37 does not have.
What Hacker News commenters pushed back on
The objections were about isolation and margin. Commenter lasiotus said gVisor, the user-space kernel Agent37 uses to separate tenants, is less secure than a full virtual machine, so a price comparison with VMs is not like for like. Another commenter, colemurray, called gVisor "not a sandbox". Agent37's site says each sandbox has its own filesystem and disk quota and that outbound traffic is firewalled to the public internet only. Full VM sandboxes with Docker cost more.
On margin, mparis wrote that "it will be difficult to capture much value selling this offering." Vishnu replied that margins are healthy even at these prices. Commenter alasano found boat.dev slightly dearer than Agent37 but with more storage, which weakens the founder's claim of being 2.8 times cheaper. That figure, like the 94 percent saving the site claims, is the company's own and was not independently checked.
The site also says SOC 2 Type I is in place and Type II is in progress, and that Agent37 runs agents for more than 100 companies. The Terminal could not verify either. Whether a $0.37 average bill can pay for support is unproven. For scale, another small infrastructure seller, CedarDB launched its cloud on a 14-person team and a $5.3 million seed.
The next number to watch is the Type II audit, which would be the first outside check on the isolation claims.
Sources
- 02Agent 37
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