Regions and trust
Where do boxes run? In the EU: Germany, Finland, and France. Your data and snapshots stay there. Is EU latency a problem from the US or Latin America? Round trips are around 100 to 200 ms. Agentic work runs for minutes, so this is not noticeable in practice. For end-user production traffic, publish builds to a CDN or regional host and keep Box for the agent and dev preview. See Build a Platform on Box. Do you have compliance certifications? Not yet. SOC 2 is in progress. Boxes are full VMs with sudo, so you can add any controls you need inside them (firewall rules, proxies, encryption).Billing
Am I billed when a box is stopped? No. Stopped boxes are free, and their snapshot is kept for the life of the box. What do snapshots, IPv4, and egress cost? Nothing extra. The latest snapshot per box is kept (up to 50 GB), every box has a dedicated IPv4, and egress is included up to 2 TB per box per month. See Billing & Limits. Do unused credits expire? Plan time resets monthly. Purchased credit packs never expire.Lifecycle
Stop or delete?box stop snapshots and is free and reversible; resume any time, months later included. box delete is permanent. Default to stop.
Why does delete or stop sometimes return an error about snapshots?
A box without a successful snapshot in the last 30 minutes refuses to stop or be deleted, to protect your data. On a freshly created box, wait a minute for the first snapshot. If it persists, snapshots are failing on that box: contact us. We are alerted automatically, fix these the same day, and refund the extra runtime.
How fast are resume and fork?
A few seconds, whatever the box holds. Files stream in the background for the first moments after access is given; reading a file that has not arrived yet simply waits until it has, it never returns wrong data. Wait for state ready or idle before running commands; commands sent earlier run before your environment variables are applied.
Do processes survive stop and resume?
Files, installed packages, and enabled systemd services do. Hand-run processes do not; restart them or make them a systemd service. See Snapshots.
Running a platform
One box per user, per project, or per session? Compare the three patterns and their costs in Build a Platform on Box. What idle timeout should I use before stopping a user’s box? Short. Stop a few seconds to a couple of minutes after the agent finishes. Resume takes seconds, so an aggressive timeout cuts cost with little UX impact. How do I handle launch spikes? Prepare a template box andbox fork it per user instead of installing from scratch, and pick a plan whose creations-per-minute limit covers your peak. See Template Boxes.
Do prepared templates actually reduce billed time?
Yes. A fork inherits the whole filesystem in seconds, so you never pay for repeated installs.
How many concurrent boxes will my user base need?
Roughly: 10,000 signups is about 100 daily active users, so 10 to 100 concurrent boxes, and up to 10x on a launch day.
Is Box good for sustained heavy compute?
Boxes have shared vCPUs and shine at agentic, IO-heavy, spiky work. For sustained multi-hour 100% CPU or GPU loads, dedicated compute primitives are a better fit.