boat
- Free allowance
- No signup credit. 'Your first plan starts with a 7-day free trial.
- Verdict
- paidno free allowance; listed for its price
- Cost
- USD 26.28/monthparsed from the record, in USD
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quotaUSD 20 plan = USD 20 of time = 555 h of the 4 vCPU default; 7-day free trial, card required
- Evidence
- documented9 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-24checked 2026-10-24 (live); stale on 2026-11-24
| Free tier | No signup credit. 'Your first plan starts with a 7-day free trial. A card is required. The trial has its own lower limits.' A plan is prepaid time: 'boat grants the included time each month. It expires at the end of the month.' unit none; metered on none; A plan credit, not a grant: USD 20 buys 555 hours of the default size and the balance lapses monthly. |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
Included plan time expires at the end of the month; credit packs cost USD 20 and never expire, which is the only way to bank time. |
| Binding | volume-quota The prepaid balance is what ends the month: 555 hours of the default size against the 730 a month needs. |
| Identity | card 'A card is required' for the first plan, including the 7-day trial. No hold amount is stated anywhere on the pricing page. |
| Egress | 'Network traffic. boat does not bill egress.' free allowance: unmetered |
| Per-object cap | Sizes: 'small 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 12 GB' at USD 0.018 an hour, 'default 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 50 GB' at USD 0.036, 'large 8 vCPU / 16 GB / 125 GB' at USD 0.072, 'xlarge 16 vCPU / 32 GB / 251 GB' at USD 0.200, the last needing the USD 100 plan. |
| Retention | A stopped sandbox keeps its disk for 14 days, then 'boat deletes the data, and the sandbox cannot resume'. Saved snapshots have no auto-deletion date. (14 days) |
| Interface | rest, cli HTTP API at https://boat.dev/api/v1 plus a CLI; hostPort exposes a port on a public URL |
| Tooling | boat CLI, Python SDK, REST; GET /limits reports the balance in seconds of default time |
| Composes with | the only cheap sandbox here that publishes a public URL per port and an IPv6 address per sandbox |
| Reliability | A stopped box loses its disk after 14 days, which is shorter than most providers here and is stated in a warning block rather than a footnote. |
| Notes | USD 0.036 x 730 = USD 26.28 for a 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 50 GB VM for a month, with no egress bill and a public IPv6 address; boat's own arithmetic gives the same figure. It is the cheapest full-VM month among the providers compared after Zipbox's USD 20, and it is a real VM, but every path to it starts with a card. |
| Evidence note | documented Sizes, rates, the expiring plan time, the 14-day disk deletion and the card requirement are all on the docs pricing page read. The trial's own limits are on a separate page not read. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 9
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | docs.boat.dev/pricing | small USD 0.018 (2 vCPU/4 GB/12 GB), default USD 0.036 (4/8/50), large USD 0.072 (8/16/125), xlarge USD 0.200 (16/32/251) |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.boat.dev/pricing | a stopped sandbox keeps its disk for 14 days; then boat deletes the data and it cannot resume |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.boat.dev/pricing | boat does not bill egress; every sandbox gets a public IPv6 address and outbound IPv4 |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.boat.dev/hosting | hostPort publishes a port on a stable HTTPS subdomain plus a token, and can open a raw TCP or UDP port |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.boat.dev/pricing | 'Your first plan starts with a 7-day free trial. A card is required. The trial has its own lower limits.', quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | boat.dev/compare | '25 free hours to start', which contradicts the docs' 7-day trial; the /free-trial link the docs point to returns 404 |
| 2026-10-22 | boat.dev/ | 'Billed per second, free when stopped. 7-day free trial, then from $20/mo', quoted |
| 2026-10-24 | docs.boat.dev/pricing | quoted: 'small ... $0.018 ... 2 vCPU 4 GB 12 GB', 'default ... $0.036 ... 4 vCPU 8 GB 50 GB', 'One default sandbox that runs a full month (730 h) costs $26.'; 'Your first plan starts with a 7-day free trial. A card is required.'; 'boat grants the included time each month. It expires at the end of the month.'; 'A stopped sandbox keeps its disk for 14 days.'; 'Network traffic. boat does not bill egress.' |
| 2026-10-24 | docs.boat.dev/pricing | quoted comparison table pricing the same machine elsewhere: 'Daytona $0.331' and 'E2B $0.331' for the 4 vCPU / 8 GB class, against boat's '$0.036'. |
More fields 18
| shape | {"vcpu": 4,"ram_gib": 8,"disk_gib": 50,"gpu_class": null,"gpu_count": null} |
|---|---|
| billing model | per-second against prepaid plan time |
| granularity | {"min_billed_s": 1,"rounding_s": 1} |
| session cap | {"wall_clock_min": null,"idle_reap_s": null,"restart_required": false,"note": "no wall-clock cap published for a paid plan"} |
| keep rate | {"value": 0.0,"basis": "a stopped sandbox costs no machine time, quoted","source": "https://docs.boat.dev/pricing"} |
| persistent storage | {"included_gib": 50,"price_gib_month": "included","durability": "14 days after stop","survives_stop": true,"survives_destroy": false,"max_retention": "14 days"} |
| network out | {"allow_outbound": true,"allow_inbound_listen": true,"ports": "public URLs per port","static_ip": false,"ipv6": true,"per_session_bytes": null} |
| free tier kind | plan-credit |
| m10h usd | 10.8 |
| m24h usd | 26.28 |
| price arithmetic | 0.036/h x 730 = 26.28; 20 plan / 0.036 = 555 h |
| price note | priced on small (2 vCPU / 4 GB / 12 GB) so the row is comparable with the others. The USD 20 plan is a floor: a light month still bills USD 20. |
| price basis | 10 h/day x 30 = 300 h; 24/7 x 30 = 730 h |
| burst x | 1.0 |
| term | monthly prepaid |
| credit usd | 0 |
| credit hours at shape | 555 |
| credit expiry | plan time expires at the end of the month; USD 20 credit packs never expire |
Corrections
- 2026-10-22 boat has a free trial, and its own pages disagree about its shape