Freestyle vs Sprites

Freestyle

A public OpenAPI 3.1 file describes 88 operations with a stable error code on every failure, and per-VM identity tokens keep the team API key away from end users. No terms of service, product privacy policy, request rate limit or incident history was found, and the only SDK is TypeScript.

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.

Freestyle

1. Send a firewall object on every POST /v5/vms. It is required, and a VM with no rules has no outbound internet
2. Ask the owner to run freestyle login in a browser once, then mint a key with freestyle tokens create --output json
3. Do not retry an exec that answers 409 VM_NON_RESPONSIVE. The command may already have run
4. Keep exec-await under its 300,000 ms cap and use a PTY session or x-freestyle-background-after-secs for longer work
5. Call the /v5 paths. The unversioned duplicates in the OpenAPI file are marked deprecated

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