E2B vs Maritime

E2B

Firecracker microVM with its own kernel per sandbox. Two major incidents over an hour in September 2026, on sandbox creation and on creating from snapshots.

Maritime

Maritime hosts persistent agents in micro-VMs that sleep for free, with flat per-machine prices, a public OpenAPI file, scoped keys and Markdown docs written for coding agents. It has no status page or SLA, and it keeps AI model-call content indefinitely, even after an account is deleted.

E2B

1. Set a timeout when you create a sandbox. The default is 5 minutes
2. Pause rather than kill when you'll come back. Resume takes about a second and nothing is billed while paused
3. Use Secret.fill in network transforms instead of passing API keys into the sandbox environment
4. Pace sandbox creation. Hobby allows 1 a second and 20 running at once
5. Move to the v2 sandbox endpoints. SDK 2.51.0 and later use them by default

Maritime

1. Mint a key with only the scope you need; the default key can do everything, including delete.
2. Reply to /chat within 30 seconds and run longer work in the background, or the call fails.
3. Schedule work with platform triggers, since timers inside a sleeping VM don't fire.
4. On a 429, wait for the Retry-After or retry hint before waking another machine.
5. Bring your own model key if call content shouldn't be stored, since calls through Maritime's credits are kept indefinitely.