# InstaBox Pricing https://instabox.sh/blog/instabox-pricing.md 2026-10-19 · Hang Huang · Product InstaBox ships pricing: a free 4 vCPU / 8 GB machine with no usage limit, and three pay-as-you-go paid tiers for more machines, bigger sizes, and lifecycle control. Today we're releasing InstaBox pricing. Since we launched on Oct 14, beta users have been using InstaBox for free. People love the experience, so "how are you going to price this?" became the #1 question we get, and figuring out our pricing became our first priority. But honestly, pricing is so god damn hard. So we decided to do what we always do: ship it, share it, and then listen to our users' feedback. ## TLDR We have 4 tiers: Free, Pro ($20), Team ($500), Enterprise. - Free gives you one 4 vCPU / 8 GB machine with no usage limit. - All paid tiers are pay-as-you-go. You get more concurrent machines, custom machine sizes, and control over your machines' lifecycle. Full details on the [Pricing page](https://instabox.sh/pricing). ## Free tier Our philosophy is simple: you should be able to feel the full power of InstaBox without paying. If the product is good enough, people will pay naturally. So we're giving everyone one solid machine (4 vCPU / 8 GB) for free. Here are a few questions you might have. **Q1: Is there a usage limit on the free machine?** No. Use it as much as you want. The only thing to know: we pause it after 30 minutes of inactivity. **Q2: Why pause after 30 minutes?** Because an InstaBox machine isn't a VPS. A VPS has to stay on 24/7 to keep its state, holding onto its CPU and RAM whether you're using it or not. That makes sense for a web app that serves traffic all day. But agent workloads are different. They come in bursts: an agent works hard on a task, then sits idle until the next one. Our machines run on microVMs, which can pause, keep everything in place, and resume in under 1s. That's a perfect fit for bursty agent work, so there's no reason to keep an idle machine running. Here's why that matters, honestly: **it's how we keep prices low.** When idle machines pause, their CPU and RAM go back to the pool and other people can use them. That keeps utilization on our servers high and lets us safely oversubscribe our hardware. Higher utilization means lower cost per machine, and that's what lets us price aggressively and offer the most generous free tier on the market. We only pause machines that are actually idle, like when your agent has finished its task or you've gone out for lunch. If you're using it, it stays on. **Q3: What happens to my free machine when I upgrade?** It stays, and becomes one of your plan's machines: it counts toward the plan's limit and its usage is billed like the others', within your plan's included usage first. ## Why one 4 vCPU / 8 GB machine 4 vCPU / 8 GB is a sweet spot. It's enough to run a coding agent, build a project, or keep a dev server running without hitting limits. Going bigger would mostly help heavy workloads, and those are what paid plans are for. It also matters for abuse: the bigger the free machine, the more attractive it is to crypto miners. Why only one? Honestly, because of abuse. Over the past few days we've run into a lot of bad actors. Because our free tier is generous, they used bots and scripts to sign up hundreds of accounts to do things that violate our terms of use, like crypto mining. We own our bare metal, so total capacity has a ceiling. When these abusers grab too much of it, a node runs out of capacity, OOMs, and goes down, taking everyone else's machines on that node down with it. That's not fair to the people using InstaBox the right way. Limiting Free to one machine is how we protect the vast majority of you from a tiny number of bad actors. And for most of you, one is enough anyway: 75% of our beta users only have one active machine. ## Our commitment to free When I was designing our pricing, I kept going back to my all-time favorite company, Cloudflare. Their pricing and infra are both great, and what I respect most is their commitment to a free tier: [Reaffirming our commitment to free](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/) I'm a deep believer in what they said: free customers help us build better products and grow our business. Two points in particular: 1. Free users help us do quality assurance (QA) quickly. 2. Offering a Free plan challenges us to build more intuitive products. So we're making the same commitment: we'll stick with our free tier, and it will keep getting better. ## A thank-you to our beta users If you've been using InstaBox since the beta, thank you. You helped us get here. So as a thank-you, you can keep running up to 5 machines on the Free tier until Dec 1, 2026. You don't need to do anything. ## About paying Last thing: money. If you need more machines, bigger specs, or control over your machines' lifecycle, it's fair to ask you to pay for that, right? We run on our own bare metal, so every machine is real CPU and RAM. Paid plans are what let us keep Free going. All paid tiers are pay-as-you-go, so you only pay for what you use. And this is just v1 of our pricing. We'll keep adjusting it based on your feedback. Check out the full pricing details on the [Pricing page](https://instabox.sh/pricing). We'd love to hear what you think about our pricing! Email us at [support@instabox.sh](mailto:support@instabox.sh), or join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/instabox).