InstaBox
- Free allowance
- 'Free gives you one 4 vCPU / 8 GiB machine to run every month at no cost', quoted, with 5 snapshots, the standard agent-browser template, auto-pause after 30 idle minutes, and the 2 vCPU / 4 GiB or 4 vCPU / 8 GiB sizes allowed.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- retention-clampedauto-pause after 30 idle minutes on the free plan; accounts created before 2026-10-20 keep five free machines only until 2026-12-01
- Evidence
- documented12 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | 'Free gives you one 4 vCPU / 8 GiB machine to run every month at no cost', quoted, with 5 snapshots, the standard agent-browser template, auto-pause after 30 idle minutes, and the 2 vCPU / 4 GiB or 4 vCPU / 8 GiB sizes allowed. Pro is USD 20 a month and Team USD 500, each including usage equal to its fee. Accounts created before 2026-10-20 keep five free machines until 2026-12-01 unit hours; metered on wall-clock; perpetual-monthly |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
The five-machine grant is a legacy state with a printed end date of 2026-12-01, so the 20 vCPU / 40 GiB figure that circulated in October 2026 expires in six weeks and the steady state is 4 vCPU / 8 GiB. |
| Binding | retention-clamped auto-pause after 30 idle minutes binds first: a free machine stops on any job that goes quiet for half an hour, and the five-machine legacy grant that circulated in the Chinese forums ends on 2026-12-01 |
| Identity | email not published |
| Egress | Free plan: 100 GiB of egress a month, then USD 0.02 per GiB; ingress is free. Separately, a machine's upload is capped at about 50 Mbit/s per VM. free allowance: 100 GiB a month on the Free plan (Pro 1 TiB, Builder 5 TiB, Team 50 TiB) price per tb: USD 0.02 per GiB beyond the allowance (USD 20.48 per TiB) |
| Retention | The five-machine grant is a legacy state with a printed end date of 2026-12-01, so the 20 vCPU / 40 GiB figure that circulated in October 2026 expires in six weeks and the steady state is 4 vCPU / 8 GiB. |
| Interface | rest, cli, ssh HTTP API with an API key, the instabox CLI, SSH through a gateway (certificate or SSH token), a TypeScript SDK (@insforge/instabox-sdk), an MCP server and a web dashboard |
| Tooling | the instabox CLI and the TypeScript SDK @insforge/instabox-sdk (npm), authenticated with an API key (INSTABOX_API_KEY) |
| Composes with | One 4 vCPU / 8 GiB machine with persistent files and snapshots is a place to hold a working set between sessions, which a notebook that resets does not give. |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | Two corrections in one record. The count moved from 5 to 1, and the 8 GiB size is not reliably creatable even on the free plan: the Japanese review reports the 8 GiB option refused at creation time. What is not established is whether the invite waitlist is still the entry route now that the product has paid plans; the changelog describes a dashboard billing page and does not mention the waitlist. The changelog of 2026-10-20 states the plan table directly: one free 4 vCPU / 8 GiB machine a month, never billed, with the five-machine grant retained only for accounts created before that date and only until 2026-12-01. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 12
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-20 | instabox.sh/changelog | quoted: 'Free gives you one 4 vCPU / 8 GiB machine to run every month at no cost'; 'Accounts created before October 20 keep five free machines until December 1'; Free sizes are 2 vCPU / 4 GiB and 4 / 8 |
| 2026-10-22 | instabox.sh/blog/instabox-pricing | the vendor's own free-tier explanation: 'we pause it after 30 minutes of inactivity' and 'Is there a usage limit on the free machine? No. Use it as much as you want' |
| 2026-10-01 | www.uupc.cn/instabox-free-beta-five-cloud-vms/ | the circulating five-machine figure, translated: 'up to 5 machines free, each 4 vCPU and 8GB', during an invite-only beta [date precision: month precision] |
| 2026-10-01 | aijp.jizhiku.net/archives/21208 | a user who received an invite after 48 hours found the 8 GiB plan could not be created and took the 4 GiB plan instead, and reports the running limit as 30 minutes [date precision: month precision] |
| 2026-10-22 | instabox.sh/pricing | quoted: Free is USD 0 with 1 machine, 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, 5 snapshots |
| 2026-10-22 | instabox.sh/ | quoted: a real virtual machine with its own kernel and root, Docker and Docker Compose run inside, persistent storage, any port gets an HTTPS URL, pause and resume |
| 2026-10-20 | www.nodeseek.com/post-997124-1 | reported, translated: 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM, a full Linux environment with root, Docker support, one machine per account, paused after 30 minutes idle with session state kept, and an invite code from a waitlist of up to about 48 hours |
| 2026-11-04 | instabox.sh/docs/limits.md | the free plan includes 100 GiB of egress a month, then USD 0.02 per GiB |
| 2026-11-04 | instabox.sh/docs/keys-sdk.md | the TypeScript SDK, HTTP, the CLI and SSH are access interfaces; the dashboard is the console |
| 2026-11-04 | instabox.sh/docs/limits.md | per-VM upload cap, separate from the monthly egress allowance |
| 2026-11-04 | instabox.sh/docs/limits.md | the free plan has a single machine size |
| 2026-11-04 | instabox.sh/docs/keys-sdk.md | SDK, CLI, HTTP and SSH are documented clients |
More fields 1
| facets | {"class": "enforcement","free_tier_kind": "perpetual-monthly","shape": {"vcpu": 4,"ram_gib": 8}} |
|---|
Unknown values 2
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed