Blaxel Sandboxes vs Sprites

Blaxel Sandboxes

No compute charge in standby, only $0.20 a GB-month of snapshot storage. 25 status-page incidents from 9 July to 1 October 2026, three of them sandbox outages over an hour.

Sprites

A Sprite keeps a 100 GB ext4 disk between runs, bills compute only while active and can be checkpointed and restored through a published OpenAPI contract. The status page records four Sprites incidents in the last 90 days, one lasting over seven hours, and outbound network access is unrestricted until a policy is set.

Blaxel Sandboxes

1. Close WebSocket and terminal connections when done. An open connection keeps the sandbox active and billed
2. Set a TTL or idle expiry on throwaway sandboxes. The default is to keep them
3. Set forbiddenDomains or an allow list at creation, with network.firewall for tools that ignore proxy settings. Both can only be set when the sandbox is created
4. Retry only on WORKLOAD_UNAVAILABLE. The error reference says other codes won't succeed on retry
5. Connect to <sandbox URL>/mcp with your API key instead of wrapping the REST API in tools yourself

Sprites

1. Create a token at sprites.dev/account after a browser signup, and send it as Authorization: Bearer <token> to https://api.sprites.dev
2. Follow the OpenAPI document, not the product page example. Create with POST /v1/sprites and a JSON name, and run commands with POST /v1/sprites/{name}/exec using cmd query parameters
3. Set a network policy with POST /v1/sprites/{name}/policy/network before running untrusted code. Egress is open until one is set
4. Processes started by exec stop on a cold wake. Define a Service for anything that must answer the request that wakes the Sprite
5. Create a checkpoint before a restore. Restoring replaces the filesystem, ends active sessions and keeps no copy of the replaced state
6. Sprite creation is limited to 10 a minute on pay-as-you-go. The Go SDK reads Retry-After and the error code sprite_creation_rate_limited on a 429
7. Delete Sprites you no longer need. An idle Sprite still bills cold storage for the bytes it holds