What is Roost?
Roost is a persistent Linux box you enter through SSH. Create a box, install the tools your project needs, leave when the work is done, and reconnect later to the same filesystem and working environment.
The product is intentionally small. There is no browser IDE to learn and no project-specific runtime model to design around. A Roost box should feel like a normal remote computer: apt, git, tmux, background jobs, scp, and the shell habits you already have.
That matters more as coding agents become normal. Agents often need a place to run for a while, accumulate state, retry commands, and leave artifacts behind. A disposable sandbox is clean, but rebuilding the same context over and over is not.
The Waste Hidden in "Always On"
A development machine is not a production service. Most dev boxes sit idle overnight, during meetings, between tasks, and after an agent finishes a run. Always-on pricing treats all of that idle time as if useful work were happening.
Roost charges for active time and keeps a much smaller sleeping charge for the state that remains. At the current public price, a box is $0.02 per active hour and $0.50 per month while sleeping. A month with 80 active hours is roughly $2.10 before any future extras such as taxes, egress, or larger machine classes.
The point is not that every workload should be squeezed into the cheapest possible machine. The point is that a dev box should have a lifecycle that matches dev work: wake when you need it, keep state while you are gone, and stop burning active compute when nobody is using it.
Where Roost Fits
| Service | Running Cost | Stopped Cost | SSH | Auto Start/Stop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roost | $0.02/hr active | $0.50/mo sleeping | Yes | Yes |
| Exe.dev | $20/mo flat | Same monthly bill | Yes | No |
| Crabbox | Provider runtime cost | $0 after release | Yes | Lease/release |
| Sprites.dev | CPU + memory time | Storage time | CLI/API console | Yes |
| AWS t3.medium | $0.0416/hr compute | EBS storage | Yes | Manual |
| Hetzner | Flat monthly VPS | Same monthly bill | Yes | No |
Exe.dev is close in spirit: a real Linux computer, persistent disk, SSH, HTTPS, and a simple monthly model. Roost is more narrowly focused on the sleepable dev box: stateful SSH first, active-hour pricing, and a machine that is not expected to run all month.
Crabbox is built for short-lived remote test runs. It leases a machine, syncs a checkout, runs a command, streams the result, and releases the lease. That is a strong fit for CI-like bursts and remote test capacity. Roost is for the other side of the workflow: a box you come back to.
Sprites.dev is a stateful sandbox platform with checkpoint and restore, API-first controls, and granular CPU, memory, and storage billing. It is useful when the product needs programmable isolated environments. Roost keeps the user-facing model closer to SSH into my Linux box.
AWS t3.medium is a general-purpose cloud VM. It is flexible, mature, and available everywhere, but the user still manages instance lifecycle, storage, networking, and the habit of stopping the machine. Hetzner is hard to beat for a cheap always-on VPS. If you need a small server running 24/7, that is the right comparison. Roost is for the hours when a developer or agent is actually using the box.
The Cases We Are Not Chasing
Roost is not trying to be the cheapest 24/7 server. If the machine must run every minute of the month, an always-on VPS can be a better fit.
It is also not a managed production platform. Roost does not promise the operational surface of AWS, the flat monthly simplicity of a VPS, or a full browser workspace. You should bring your own backup habits for important data and treat the box like a development machine, not a database service with an SLA.
The first users we are building for are developers and agents that work in bursts: a few hours of coding, a long agent run, a tmux session left in place, a project environment that should still be there tomorrow. For that job, a Linux box that can sleep is the simpler shape.