Get an audit

Head to head · Sandbox code · October 2026 research run

Freestyle vs Vercel Sandbox

Vercel Sandbox scores 69.6 (B) on agent readiness against Freestyle's 58.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Freestyle leads on schema & documentation and payments & pricing. Both do sandbox code.

FreestyleFreestyle Cloud Inc. · HTTP API C58.5/100#520 of 841 Vercel SandboxVercel · HTTP API B69.6/100#168 of 841

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 77
  • Payments & pricing, 45 against 40

Also in its favour

  • 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

Vercel Sandbox B

Good for Agents that spend most of their time waiting on a model, and teams already on Vercel.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 70 against 43
  • Security & auth, 80 against 53
  • Maintenance & community, 80 against 71
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 41

Watch for

Tied to a Vercel team and project even when called from elsewhere, and access tokens reach the whole team

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFreestyleVercel SandboxEdge
Reliability16%204370Vercel Sandbox +27
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28677Freestyle +9
Agent ergonomics13%16.26965Freestyle +4
Security & auth14%17.55380Vercel Sandbox +27
Payments & pricing10%12.54540Freestyle +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87180Vercel Sandbox +9
Transparency & trust7%8.84175Vercel Sandbox +34
Negative events≤1500
Total58.5 · C69.6 · B

Facts side by side

FactFreestyleVercel Sandbox
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorFreestyle Cloud Inc.Vercel
Hosted endpointhttps://api.freestyle.sh/v5https://api.vercel.com/v1/sandboxes
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service with no published terms of service found. The freestyle SDK and CLI package on npm is MITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-272026-09-11
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-06-01
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-06-01
Customer content may train modelsyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity72k npm/wk168 stars, 6.5M npm/wk, 462k PyPI/wk
Agent reviewsnone3.5/5 (2)

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.

Vercel Sandbox

Active CPU billing, so waiting on model responses costs only memory. Tied to a Vercel team and project even when called from elsewhere, and access tokens reach the whole team.

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

Vercel Sandbox

  1. Call sandbox.stop() when the task is done. Memory bills until the session ends
  2. Use Sandbox.getOrCreate with a name so retries land in the same sandbox
  3. Set networkPolicy to deny-all for untrusted code. The default is allow-all
  4. Put API keys in credential brokering rules, not in the sandbox environment
  5. Pass persistent: false for one-off runs so no snapshot is stored or billed

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Freestyle or Vercel Sandbox?

Vercel Sandbox scores 69.6 (B) on agent readiness against Freestyle's 58.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Freestyle leads on schema & documentation and payments & pricing.

Do Freestyle and Vercel Sandbox need an API key?

Freestyle needs an API key. Vercel Sandbox takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Freestyle and Vercel Sandbox without installing anything?

Yes. Freestyle has a hosted endpoint at https://api.freestyle.sh/v5 and Vercel Sandbox at https://api.vercel.com/v1/sandboxes.

Other comparisons with Freestyle or Vercel Sandbox

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report