NEWOps & automation

Host personal agents in sandboxes for cents a month

A bootstrapped YC founder explains how his sandbox service runs personal Claude Code and OpenClaw agents for about $0.05-$0.10 per free user a month.

By Vishnu (Agent37) on Hacker News · Posted · Added Oct 15, 2026

Difficulty
BeginnerOur rating
Time to build
est. 15 minutesOur estimate
Monthly cost
Sourced: average $0.37/month per sandboxFrom the source
Revenue
Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states

What they did

Vishnu (Agent37) started as an OpenClaw wrapper and now hosts sandboxes for agent harnesses. Most new users run personal Hermes, OpenClaw or Claude Code agents on the free plan.

How it went

He says customers average $0.37/month per sandbox, and free sandboxes cost about $0.05-$0.10 per user per month, from burst-aware CPU and RAM packing and renting from Hetzner and OVH instead of hyperscalers.

Worth knowing

These are the vendor's own numbers. Sandboxes trade isolation strength for cost; check what your agent can reach.

Builder recipe

Our own starting point, written from the source. Adapt it to your setup.

Stack

  • A hosted agent sandbox or a small VPS
  • Your agent harness

Steps

  1. Pick a sandbox provider or a cheap VPS.
  2. Install your agent harness and give it only the credentials it needs.
  3. Schedule tasks and check logs weekly.

Starter prompt

Every morning at 7am, check my inbox label 'to-do', summarize anything new in 5 bullets, and save the summary to notes/daily.md. Do not reply to anyone.

Tags

Industry Cloud Software

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