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Heighliner vs hosted agent sandboxes
Hosted sandbox services give an agent an isolated machine through an API. Heighliner runs whole fleets with budgets, approvals and audit around them. Which do you need?
Hosted agent sandboxes and Heighliner overlap in one place: both give an agent an isolated place to run code. They are built for different jobs. This page compares the categories, not specific vendors; features and prices differ by provider, so check their current documentation.
What is the difference?
A hosted sandbox is a building block. You call an API, get an isolated environment, run code in it and tear it down. What the agent is allowed to spend, which actions need a person and what gets recorded are left to the code you write around it.
Heighliner is the layer around the agent. A sandbox per agent is included, and every fleet also gets a dollar budget with a hard stop, schedules and triggers, approvals for risky actions, and a tamper-evident audit trail. You bring an existing harness instead of writing the orchestration yourself.
| Hosted sandbox service | Heighliner | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | A sandbox | A fleet of agents |
| Isolation | Yes | A sandbox per agent |
| Budgets and approvals | You build them | Built in |
| Schedules and triggers | You build them | Built in |
| Audit trail | Varies by provider | Hash-chained, with receipts |
| Bring an agent harness | You integrate it | Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, OpenCode, container or endpoint |
| Deployment | Varies by provider | Managed, BYOC or self-hosted |
When is a sandbox service the better choice?
- You are building your own agent product and need sandboxes as a low-level primitive.
- You want full control of orchestration and already have budgets and approvals of your own.
- You need sandbox features specific to one provider.
When is Heighliner the better choice?
When you want to run agents, not build an agent platform: put them on a schedule, cap what they spend, gate what they can do, and keep a record. See how it works.
Updated
Questions
- Does Heighliner replace a sandbox service?
- For running your own agents, Heighliner includes a sandbox per agent, so you do not need a separate one. If you are building a product that needs raw sandboxes as a primitive, a dedicated sandbox service may fit better.
- Which is cheaper?
- It depends on the provider and the workload. Check each provider's current pricing. Heighliner's managed usage prices are on the pricing page and are early access prices.
Related
- Heighliner vs a VPS, a cron job and a .env fileAn honest comparison of running AI agents on your own VPS with cron and running them on Heighliner: cost, control, budgets, approvals and when the VPS is the better choice.
- SandboxOn Heighliner every agent runs in its own sandbox, with keys attached outside it and network egress only through the gateway, so one agent cannot reach another's work.
- SecurityHow Heighliner contains AI agents: a sandbox per agent, keys outside the sandbox, egress through a gateway, approvals with escrow and a hash-chained audit trail.
- PricingHeighliner early access pricing: Free, Pro $20 and Team $200 with usage credit, per-second usage, model tokens on your own key, plus BYOC and self-hosted.