# Islo

Official pricing: https://islo.dev/pricing  
Category: agent-sandbox · Isolation: vm

## Pricing regimes (raw)

- **Pay-as-you-go (Team list rates)** (resource): $0.07/vCPU-h, $0.04/GiB-h

## Features

Yes: snapshots, memory snapshots, fork/clone, pause/resume, persistent disk, idle auto-stop, ≥24 h sessions, custom image (Docker or snapshot), start from your own snapshot, your own Docker/OCI image, full VM (own kernel), Docker inside, root, browser, preinstalled agents, SSH, HTTPS preview URLs, egress allowlist, open internet, private networking, BYOC, SSO, credential injection, HTTP method/path egress rules, wake on request, live fork (no pause), webhooks, scheduled runs (cron), audit logs, automatic snapshots, snapshots on demand, agent harness API, gVisor or VM (no shared kernel), inbound access rules, firewall inside (nftables), secret proxy, secret proxy for any API

No: volumes, nested virtualization, desktop GUI, computer-use API, code interpreter, browser + desktop control, anti-bot stealth, CAPTCHA solving, residential IPs, public IPv4, raw TCP inbound, static egress IP, self-hosting, open source, GPU, arm64, Windows, macOS, Python, Node.js, GPU desktop, live resize, memory fork, EU data residency, MCP server, hosted agent API (their own agent), extra volumes, shared volumes

Unknown: everything else. Evidence (source + quote) per feature: https://battleships.dev/data/providers/islo.json → feature_evidence

## Caveats

- Billing granularity and minimum per start unpublished ('billed per hour' / 'per vCPU-hour'); per-second metering not confirmed.
- Whether disk is billed while paused/stopped is unresolved: FAQ says 'No charge when stopped' but storage is a listed $0.0007/GB-h meter.
- Named snapshot storage price unpublished (snapshot_gib_month null); if billed at the disk rate it would be $0.511/GB-month.
- Disk billed per provisioned GB with no stated free allowance; included_disk_gib=0 reflects that, and the engine should add W.disk x $0.0007/GB-h while running.
- Free (5 concurrent) / Team (50 concurrent) / Enterprise tiers come from launch press coverage (The New Stack, May 2026), not an Islo page.
- Signup credit amount unpublished; Harbor users get $250 one-time via promo code HARBOR250 (not modeled in free.one_time_credit).
- Egress, IPv4 and region pricing unpublished; no public IPv4 product (HTTPS shares + CLI tunnel only).
- Gateway inference (Islo-managed LLMs) draws from the same credits at unpublished token rates.
- Lifecycle policy (pause_after_idle etc.) is immutable after creation; sandboxes without it bill at full rate while idle.
- Heavy paused sandboxes can take 5-7 min to become resumable (third-party report).
- No benchmark data for islo in benchmarks.json.
- Official RL page cost example bills 10-minute tasks pro rata (500 tasks x ~10 min at 4 vCPU / 1 GB / ~2 GB disk = $26.78, ~$0.054/task), so metering is at least sub-hour in practice. Exact granularity and per-start minimum are still unpublished; the engine should not assume hourly rounding.
- Official pages show 300 concurrent Harbor rollouts ('--n-concurrent 300', 'hundreds of concurrent rollouts'), well above the press-reported 50-concurrent Team cap. The cap is probably raisable, but it is still not published on any Islo page.

## How this provider charges


As of 2026-09-28. Islo launched on 2026-05-04 (PR Newswire). The public price list is short: three meters, and they apply only while a sandbox runs. Most of the nuance is in the plan tiers (these appear only in press coverage), the AWS Marketplace package, and what a paused or stopped sandbox is billed for.

## Regime table

| # | Regime | When it applies | How billed | Numbers | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | **Team / pay-as-you-go (list)** | Default for a sandbox that is running | Per vCPU **allocated** ("per core while the env runs"), RAM **provisioned**, disk **provisioned**. CPU utilisation has no effect on the bill. | $0.07/vCPU-h, $0.04/GB-h RAM, $0.0007/GB-h disk (= $0.511/GB-month). A 4 vCPU/8 GB sandbox costs $0.60/h before disk. | https://islo.dev/pricing |
| 2 | **Free plan** | Signup ("credits to start, no card required") | Draws down a signup credit balance, held in cents (`balance_cents`, USD) | Credit amount not published. Up to **5 concurrent sandboxes** (press coverage). | https://islo.dev/pricing ; https://docs.islo.dev/api-reference/credits/get-credit-balance.md ; The New Stack launch article (seen only as a search-index snippet) |
| 3 | **Team plan concurrency cap** | Paid pay-as-you-go | Same rates as #1 | Up to **50 concurrent** running sandboxes (press coverage). Paused sandboxes do **not** count against the running-sandbox quota. | The New Stack (snippet) ; https://docs.islo.dev/concepts/sandbox-lifecycle.md |
| 4 | **AWS Marketplace "Team Starter Package"** | Buying through AWS Marketplace | $50/month contract that grants **$50 of monthly credits**, which usage draws down | $50/mo, 1-month recurring, **no refunds**. The listing says the credit covers "about 294 hours per month", but it does not say for which machine size (294 h × $0.60 would be $176, so it is not the 4/8 size). Overage handling and credit rollover are "not specified" in the listing. | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-3eew6wp37ylek |
| 5 | **Enterprise / BYOC** | Custom deal, or agent computers running in the customer's own cloud/VPC | FAQ: "You still pay for compute time. BYOC deployment terms may vary." | No numbers published. It is unclear whether BYOC bills Islo's list rates on top of the customer's own cloud bill. | https://islo.dev/pricing (FAQ) ; https://islo.dev/solutions/enterprise |
| 6 | **Idle-but-running** | The sandbox is up but doing nothing, before `pause_after_idle` fires, or with no lifecycle policy at all | **Full rate #1**. There is no idle discount, and billing is on allocation. | $0.60/h for 4/8, plus disk | https://docs.islo.dev/concepts/sandbox-lifecycle.md |
| 7 | **Paused** (`islo pause` or the lifecycle timers) | The VM snapshots memory and filesystem, then releases compute | CPU and RAM are $0. Disk and snapshot billing is **not documented**. The pricing page says "No charge when stopped" and "no idle fees", but it also lists storage as a per-GB-hour meter. | $0 compute. Storage is either $0 or $0.0007/GB-h (unconfirmed). | https://islo.dev/pricing ; https://docs.islo.dev/cli/sandbox-commands.md |
| 8 | **Stopped** (`islo stop`: halted, still in the list) | Distinct from pause: the VM is halted, no memory state is kept, and the filesystem stays | FAQ: "No charge when stopped." Whether the disk meter keeps running is unconfirmed. | $0 compute. Storage unknown. | https://islo.dev/pricing (FAQ) |
| 9 | **Named snapshots** (`islo snapshot save`) | Filesystem image, used to restore into new sandboxes and fan out | Not priced anywhere. Snapshot sizes are reported (for example 2.1 GB). | null | https://docs.islo.dev/cli/snapshots.md |
| 10 | **Harbor promo** | Harbor (Terminal-Bench / RL) users who enter promo code `HARBOR250` in Billing | One-time credit | **$250** | https://docs.islo.dev/integrations/harbor.md |
| 11 | **Gateway inference** | Calls to Islo-managed LLMs via gateway.islo.dev (OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints) | Drawn "from credits". This is a separate token meter, not compute. | Per-token prices not published | https://docs.islo.dev/concepts/gateway-inference.md ; github.com/islo-labs/skills |
| 12 | **Per-task cost limits** | Optional spend cap per run or task | Hard stop, not a price | The limit is set by the user | https://islo.dev/pricing (FAQ "Can I cap spend per run?") |
| — | Egress / IPv4 / region | — | Not published. There is no public IPv4 product: shares are HTTPS only, and non-HTTP access goes through a CLI tunnel. The only region seen is `us-west`. | null | — |

## Gotchas
- **CPU is billed on allocation.** "Per core while the env runs" means a sandbox at 30% utilisation pays the same as one at 100%. There is no active-CPU billing.
- **RAM is expensive at $0.04/GB-h.** That is roughly 2.5× E2B's $0.0162, so RAM is more than half the bill for a 1:2 vCPU:GB shape (4/8: $0.32 of the $0.60/h).
- **Disk is billed per provisioned GB from the first GB.** No free allowance is stated. $0.511/GB-month is about 6× typical block storage. If paused or stopped disk turns out to be billed, long-lived paused workspaces add up.
- **"No charge when stopped" conflicts with the listed storage meter.** Whether disk is billed while paused or stopped is unresolved.
- **Granularity is unknown.** The page says "billed per hour" and "per vCPU-hour", and per-second metering is never confirmed. If Islo rounds each start up to the hour, short sandboxes cost a full hour.
- **Team caps at 50 concurrent sandboxes, which is exactly the size of the worked example.** The Free plan caps at 5. Both numbers come only from press coverage; none of Islo's own pages publish plan tiers.
- **Lifecycle policy is immutable after creation.** If you forget `pause_after_idle`, the sandbox bills at full rate until you delete it. `pause_after` is a hard cap per active stretch, not per lifetime.
- **Resuming a heavy paused sandbox can take 5–7 minutes** while "archival state settles" (third-party agentbox provider README). Large images (about 1.3 GB compressed) are rejected with a 503.
- **The AWS Marketplace package has no refunds and does not specify overage.** Its "294 hours" figure does not match any size at list rates, and may be boilerplate carried over from Incredibuild's build-acceleration product.
- No startup-program numbers are published (the /solutions/startups page has none).

## Worked example
Workload: 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, 50 concurrent sandboxes × 8 h/day × 22 days = **8,800 sandbox-hours**, 30% CPU utilisation, 50 GiB of snapshots retained, 100 GiB egress.

Assumptions: disk is 10 GB per sandbox (the default in the docs' islo.yaml), and sandboxes are paused (not left running) outside working hours.

| Regime | Compute | Running disk | Snapshots 50 GiB | Egress 100 GiB | **Monthly total** |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team PAYG (list) | 8,800 × $0.60 = $5,280.00 (30% utilisation gives no discount) | 50×10 GB × 176 h × $0.0007 = $61.60 | $0 (if paused storage is free) to $25.55 (at $0.511/GB-mo) | unknown (not published) | **$5,341.60 – $5,367.15** + egress |
| Team PAYG + paused workspaces kept all month | as above | as above | + 50×10 GB × 554 off-hours × $0.0007 = $193.90, only if paused disk is billed | unknown | up to **$5,561.05** + egress |
| No pause policy (left running 24/7) | 50 × 730 × $0.60 = $21,900.00 | $255.50 | $0–25.55 | unknown | **$22,155.50 – $22,181.05** |
| AWS Marketplace Starter ($50/mo credit) | The $50 is consumed within about 83 h of 4/8. After that, the price depends on overage handling, which is unspecified. | | | | **≥ $5,341.60** if overage is billed at list (the $50 fee is absorbed as credit) |
| Free plan | Not feasible: capped at 5 concurrent (would need 10× the wall-clock time), and the credit amount is unknown | | | | n/a |
| Enterprise / BYOC | custom (null) | | | | null |
| One-time Harbor promo | −$250 in the first month only | | | | $5,091.60 – $5,117.15 in month 1 |

Normalised rate: 4 vCPU/8 GiB = **$0.60/h** (+ $0.007/h for 10 GB of disk).