Maritime vs Sprites

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.

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.

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.

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