# Freestyle vs Sprites

> Freestyle and Sprites score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 58.5 (C) and 58.3 (C). Sprites leads on reliability, security & auth, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do sandbox code. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by…

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/freestyle-vs-sprites
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/freestyle-vs-sprites.md (~2,600 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/freestyle-vs-sprites.min.md (~730 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/freestyle-vs-sprites.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-09

Freestyle and Sprites score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 58.5 (C) and 58.3 (C). Sprites leads on reliability, security & auth, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do sandbox code.

- Freestyle: grade C, 58.5/100, rank #520 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/freestyle.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/freestyle.json
- Sprites: grade C, 58.3/100, rank #528 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/sprites.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/sprites.json

## Which one, for what

### Freestyle (C)

Good for: Suited to long-running agent work that needs a full Linux VM, memory-preserving pause, snapshots to branch from and private networking.

Ahead on:
- Schema & documentation, 86 against 74
- Payments & pricing, 45 against 30

Also in its favour:
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Free to start without a card

Watch for: No terms of service or service agreement found on the site, and the privacy policy covers the website only

### Sprites (C)

Good for: Agents that need a long-lived machine with installed tools and files kept between sessions, and rollback by checkpoint.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 55 against 43
- Security & auth, 59 against 53
- Maintenance & community, 80 against 71
- Transparency & trust, 59 against 41

Watch for: Four Sprites incidents on the status page in 90 days, including a partial outage of 7 hours 28 minutes on 23 September 2026 and failed creates outside Europe for 28 minutes on 8 October


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Freestyle | Sprites | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 43 | 55 | Sprites +12 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 86 | 74 | Freestyle +12 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 69 | 68 | Freestyle +1 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 53 | 59 | Sprites +6 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 45 | 30 | Freestyle +15 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 71 | 80 | Sprites +9 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 41 | 59 | Sprites +18 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -2 | |
| **Total** | | **58.5 · C** | **58.3 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Freestyle | Sprites |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Freestyle Cloud Inc. | Fly.io |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.freestyle.sh/v5` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service with no published terms of service found. The `freestyle` SDK and CLI package on npm is MIT | Proprietary service under the Fly.io Terms of Service. The JavaScript, Go, Python and Elixir SDKs are MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-09-27 | 2026-10-06 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | 2026-04-29 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 2026-09-24 |
| Customer content may train models |  | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access |  | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking |  | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice |  | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver |  | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 72k npm/wk | 158k npm/wk, 59k PyPI/wk |

## Verdicts

**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.

## Before you call either

### 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

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Freestyle or Sprites?

Freestyle and Sprites score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 58.5 (C) and 58.3 (C). Sprites leads on reliability, security & auth, maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

### Do Freestyle and Sprites need an API key?

Both need an API key.

### Can an agent call Freestyle and Sprites without installing anything?

Freestyle has a hosted endpoint at https://api.freestyle.sh/v5. No hosted endpoint is listed for Sprites.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/freestyle-vs-sprites.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/freestyle-vs-sprites.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "freestyle", "b": "sprites"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare freestyle sprites`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/freestyle.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/sprites.json

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