Infrastructure / Deployment

Fly Sprites

Closed-source stateful sandbox product (launched Jan 2026), Firecracker microVMs with 100GB persistent NVMe storage that boot in 1–12s cold, ~300ms warm checkpoint/restore, and auto-idle when inactive. Picked by teams who reject ephemeral sandboxes for coding agents and want a persistent computer the agent can return to. Pitched explicitly against E2B/Modal/Daytona for long-running Claude Code-style sessions.

Sprites (sprites.dev) by Fly.io, launched Jan 2026. Persistent, hardware-isolated Firecracker microVMs ('a persistent Linux computer') for running arbitrary code / AI agents, with 100GB NVMe persistence and sub-1s checkpoint/restore. Confirmed live June 2026 via sprites.dev. Proprietary managed service (Fly.io's E2B competitor).

Openness

1 high confidence

1.0

license: Proprietary
service: proprietary(Fly.io managed)
source: closed
clients: CLI/REST/JS/Go SDKs (client libs only, no open runtime)
isolation: Firecracker(Firecracker itself is OSS/AWS, but the Sprites product/orchestration is proprietary)

Proprietary managed sandbox SaaS; no open source runtime published (only client SDKs). Underlying Firecracker is OSS but the product is not.

https://sprites.dev/ recorded 2026-06-04
Sprites = hardware-isolated Firecracker execution env for arbitrary code; managed service, CLI/REST/JS/Go clients; no self-hostable open runtime

Adoption

1 low confidence

1.0

Launched Jan 2026 (~5 months at scoring time) as Fly.io's answer to E2B. No disclosed user/customer/usage counts on the product page or launch coverage; positioned for AI coding-agent sessions (Claude Code/Codex). Early-stage; placed at 1 on reported traction with low confidence pending real numbers.

https://sprites.dev/ recorded 2026-06-04
product live, usage-based pricing ($0.07/CPU-hr); no user/customer figures disclosed
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/sprites-dev/ recorded 2026-06-04
Sprites launched early Jan 2026 as Fly.io's E2B competitor (corroborating recency, not a usage figure)

Capability

4 medium confidence

4.0

Top-tier microVM isolation plus persistent stateful sandboxes (explicitly anti-ephemeral) is a strong, differentiated feature set. Not a 5 only because it is brand-new with unproven scale vs incumbents; isolation + persistence are best-in-class.

https://sprites.dev/ recorded 2026-06-04
Firecracker isolation, persistent ext4 filesystem, sub-1s restore, arbitrary Linux code

Unchanged since 2026-07-30 (last edited, not re-checked)