Prized
The dev box that feels like localhost
About Prized
Prized sells a cloud machine that behaves like your own laptop, aimed squarely at the problem of coding agents that stop working the moment you close the lid. A Prized box runs around the clock, its ports resolve as localhost, and files move in both directions, so an agent keeps building, testing and iterating while you are away and you can check on it from anywhere. The pitch is narrow and technical rather than broad: it is infrastructure for people who already run agents and want somewhere persistent to run them.
Alongside the long-lived boxes it offers sandboxes, currently in beta: microVMs that code creates and throws away through the API or CLI, billed by the second from the same balance. The billing model is the part worth reading carefully, because it is not a conventional tier ladder. You choose how much credit lands in your balance each month, anywhere from $10 to $1,000, and your boxes draw on that balance by the hour. Unused credit rolls over for up to two months, an asleep box pays only for its disk, and you can spend the balance on any mix of machine sizes. Prized is backed by Y Combinator, and its pricing page publishes per-second rates down to four decimal places, which is unusually candid for this category.
You start free, with credit on the account and no card required, and pick a box size. A Micro is 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk, and larger shapes are available from the same balance. The box is yours persistently rather than per-session.
Day to day you connect to the box and work as though it were local. Ports map to localhost so a dev server on the box is reachable the way it would be on your own machine, and file sync runs both ways so edits on either side converge. Agents you run on the box carry on through the night; the product is explicit that at six you close the lid and the agents keep working.
Billing happens by the hour against your monthly balance, and only while a box is awake. A sleeping box bills for its disk alone. For throwaway work, your code can spin up sandboxes through the API or CLI, each billed per second for the vCPU, memory and disk it holds, and charged only for its disk and saved memory while paused.
- •Persistent boxes for agents - a machine that stays up around the clock so long-running agent work does not die with your laptop session.
- •Localhost-equivalent ports - services running on the box are reachable as localhost, which removes the tunnelling and port-forwarding friction that usually makes remote development feel remote.
- •Two-way file sync - changes propagate in both directions, so local editors and remote agents operate on the same tree without a manual push step.
- •Per-second sandboxes - microVMs created and destroyed through the API or CLI, up to 8 vCPU and 16 GB each, billed per second with no minimum, drawing on the same balance as the boxes.
- •Chooseable monthly balance - rather than fixed tiers you pick a figure from $10 to $1,000 a month, unused credit rolls over up to two months, and you can change or cancel at any time.
- •Published per-unit rates - $0.04 per vCPU-hour, $0.0125 per GB-hour of memory and $0.0001 per GB-hour of disk, with a sleeping sandbox paying the disk rate only.
Prized fits developers who already run coding agents and keep hitting the limits of a laptop that sleeps, small teams who want agent work to continue overnight, and anyone building a product that needs to create disposable execution environments programmatically. The per-second sandbox billing makes it reasonable for workloads that spike and vanish, and the localhost behaviour suits people who resent the ceremony of remote dev environments.
It is not for everyone. Developers who do not run agents will find a plain VM from any cloud cheaper and more familiar, and the comparison table on Prized's own pricing page exists precisely because it competes with AWS, Google Cloud, E2B, GitHub Codespaces and DigitalOcean on that ground. Teams needing compliance paperwork, guaranteed support or spend above $1,000 a month are pushed to a call rather than self-serve. Sandboxes are still in beta, so anything depending on them is depending on a moving surface. And it is early: the product has a small public footprint and no reviews, so you are buying on the strength of the engineering rather than a track record.
