Vishnu, founder of Agent37 (YC F26), announced on Hacker News that the company builds sandboxes for running AI agents at under 10% of the cost of most sandbox providers. Its customers spend an average of $0.37 per month per sandbox. The company began as an OpenClaw wrapper in February, adding more agent harnesses over time.
Agent37 is now able to offer a free plan, which was previously too costly for the bootstrapped startup. More than 90% of new signups are free plan users hosting personal agents such as Hermes, Openclaw, and Claude Code on its cloud. Infrastructure costs for free sandboxes average $0.05 to $0.10 per user per month.
The savings come from several techniques. Agent harnesses use CPU in bursts and need more RAM for browser and computer-use tasks, so efficient management of those resources lowers costs. Agent37 also rents hosts from vendors such as Hetzner and OVH rather than hyperscalers, which carry 80-90% margins on VMs. It uses gVisor to share host memory across sandboxes and fast boot times, though gVisor sandboxes do not support Docker-in-Docker or Android emulators. Full VM sandboxes are available for workloads that need them, including Docker, at a slightly higher price.
Vishnu previously worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon, where he built the internal AI chatbot Diya and the coding harness Ziya, and as an Engineering Manager at Quantcast. The company is seeking developers building messaging agents to test their workloads.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing