Maritime vs Modal Sandboxes

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.

Modal Sandboxes

GPU sandboxes at the same per-second rates as the rest of Modal. No REST API, and the JavaScript and Go SDKs are beta.

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.

Modal Sandboxes

1. Pass timeout= when you create a sandbox. The default lifetime is 5 minutes
2. Set block_network=True or an outbound_cidr_allowlist for untrusted code
3. Give a sandbox a name so a retried create raises AlreadyExistsError instead of starting a second one
4. Snapshot the filesystem before the 24-hour limit and start a fresh sandbox from it
5. Catch ResourceExhaustedError from Sandbox.create() on SDK 1.6.0 and later, since create now waits until scheduled