# Sprites Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/sprites/ 34 people recommended Sprites in Hacker News comments, 17 had mixed feelings and 23 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 12 months, in 19 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** People recommend Sprites as persistent Linux machines for running AI coding agents, with checkpoints and usage-based pricing. Critics most often cite bugs, unclear documentation, and idle billing that they could not verify. Summary written by Claude from 51 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 48 of those comments still count. ## Why people recommend it - Isolated sandbox for AI agents (5 comments in the sample): "Sprites arguably has the better security boundary, since the agent isn’t sitting adjacent to my laptop and home network." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894578)) "They're also useful for anyone who's building their own product that needs an inexpensive way to execute unsafe code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052362)) "they’re great to prevent Claude from breaking a machine, but there’s no pervasive sandbox for third party services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46691448)) - Persistent disk with checkpoints and restore (4 comments in the sample): "durable state and checkpoints solve real pain points that stateless containers force you to work around" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574715)) "when you snapshot, you snapshot memory AND the filesystem (immutable ftw), that's pretty awesome" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575913)) "Filesystem checkpoint and restore make it easy to recover from even catastrophic mistakes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46691305)) - Quick to create disposable machines (4 comments in the sample): "If you want to try something new out real quick, it makes no sense to figure out which of your existing Sprites to use…" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571629)) "now all employees can spin up dev envs and actually prototype, verify or reproduce something before coming to engineering" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49569465)) "this makes it very easy (and cheap!) to spin up an entire new machine with a public url and HTTPS whenever you want to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636055)) - Usage-based pricing, cheap to run (1 comment in the sample): "Sprites pricing is based on usage, not reserved capacity, so depending on what you're doing I think it can actually be cheaper than Shellbox." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643930)) ## What people warn about - Buggy product and unclear documentation (5 comments in the sample): "it is very neat but also there are a bunch of things that are unclear / undocumented" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46569153)) "my experience in the first 20 seconds is unfortunately like some of my other experiences coding against Fly APIs, they're broken" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573051)) "I had the same problem when recently trying to understand the details of spec-kit or sprites from their docs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735041)) - Idling and billing uncertainty (4 comments in the sample): "It just needs the idling feature to work as advertised before I think I can use it as cost-effectively as it promises." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638033)) "Can't tell for sure if this means I'm losing credits as there is no billing usage shown anywhere." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636672)) "There needs to be a way to see how much it is being used then and not simply the life of the Sprite." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637932)) ## Other cloud sandboxes people recommend - [Deno Sandbox](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deno-sandbox/): 16 recommend, 4 mixed, 8 criticize - [E2B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/e2b/): 15 recommend, 3 mixed, 4 criticize - [Shellbox](https://hackerapproved.com/p/shellbox/): 7 recommend, 4 mixed, 1 criticize - [amazing-sandbox by ashishb](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazing-sandbox/): 5 recommend, 0 mixed, 4 criticize ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://fly.io/sprites/) ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Sprites", https://hackerapproved.com/p/sprites/ (34 recommend, 17 mixed, 23 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.