# mashines.dev

> mashines.dev runs long-running stateful apps, AI agents, and cronjobs on hardware-isolated microVMs. Its defining capability is **live migration**: the platform moves a running workload between physical hosts while preserving memory, disk, and open network connections, with millisecond-scale, effectively zero, downtime and no process restart. The workload's uptime counter never resets across host maintenance, rebalancing, or resizing.

## What it is
- A cloud compute platform built on hardware-virtualized microVMs (each workload gets its own kernel, not a shared-kernel container).
- Designed for workloads that must stay running and keep state: stateful APIs, AI agents, background workers, cronjobs, game/realtime servers, self-hosted databases.
- Billing is usage-based and per-second, with scale-to-zero: idle machines stop accruing compute charges.

## The key differentiator: live migration
- Other platforms (Fly Machines, E2B, Modal, AWS Fargate, Cloud Run, Railway, Render) **stop and recreate** a workload to move it, causing a cold start and loss of in-memory state.
- mashines.dev **live-migrates** the running microVM: pre-copies RAM while serving traffic, pauses for a few milliseconds to flush dirty pages and device state, then resumes on the destination host with disk and network identity intact.
- Result: zero-downtime host maintenance and rebalancing; the process is never restarted.

## Best for
- Long-lived AI agents needing persistent memory + strong isolation for untrusted/model-generated code (vs ephemeral sandboxes like E2B/Modal/Daytona).
- Stateful servers that can't afford a restart (WebSocket/game/realtime, databases, caches).
- Cronjobs and burst workers: sub-second boot from snapshot, then scale to zero.
- Cloud dev environments / devcontainers: real Docker per machine runs the devcontainer CLI and nested containers natively; unlike Codespaces there is no idle timeout or forced rebuild, and live migration keeps the editor session alive.

## Access & runtime
- Each machine boots container-os (https://github.com/migetapp/container-os), Miget's microVM base image, on Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 or Alpine 3.19-3.22. It ships Docker, Podman, docker-compose, and OpenSSH preinstalled, with full root. You can run containers and Compose stacks inside your own VM.
- Connect via `mashines enter <machine>` for an instant bash shell.
- IPv6-first: every machine has its own public IPv6 address; ssh/scp directly on port 22 (e.g. ssh root@abcd.mashine.dev). The address is stable across live migrations.
- IPv4-only clients reach a machine through a shared entrypoint host on a per-machine port (e.g. ssh -p 2201 root@entry160.mashine.dev).
- Networking is free: no charge for the public IPv6, ingress, or egress.
- Dev containers: because Docker is built in, you can run the devcontainer CLI against your repo's devcontainer.json over SSH; nested containers work natively (no docker-in-docker shims).

## Pages
- [Home](https://mashines.dev/): overview, pillars, how live migration works, use cases, FAQ.
- [Waitlist](https://mashines.dev/waitlist.html): early-access signup (the product is in private early access).
- [Compare](https://mashines.dev/compare.html): feature matrix vs Fly Machines, E2B/Modal/Daytona, AWS Fargate/Cloud Run, Railway/Render.
- [Pricing](https://mashines.dev/pricing.html): usage-based rates, cost calculator, plans (Pay-as-you-go/Developer/Scale/Enterprise).

## Pricing (summary)
- vCPU: $0.020 / vCPU-hour (active only, per-second).
- Memory: $0.010 / GB-hour (active only, per-second).
- Persistent volume: $0.15 / GB-month (follows the VM across migrations).
- Egress: free. No bandwidth charges for egress, ingress, or in-region traffic.
- Scale-to-zero pauses compute billing when idle. Live migration is included at no charge. No perpetual free tier: $5 one-time trial credit, verified payment method required.
- Price comparison (1 vCPU + 2 GB always-on, ~monthly, illustrative): mashines.dev ~$29, Fly Machines ~$31, Railway ~$40, AWS Fargate ~$36, Cloud Run ~$76, E2B/Modal/Daytona ~$30-100 (time-boxed). Cheapest comparable dedicated-VM option, free egress, only one with live migration.

## Plans
- Pay-as-you-go, $0 base (billed per-second), $5 one-time trial credit, verified payment method required, 1 region, community support.
- Developer, $20/mo incl. $20 usage, all regions, snapshots, 99.9% uptime.
- Scale, from $250/mo, committed-use discounts up to 30%, priority/predictive migration, 99.95% SLA, SSO.
- Enterprise, custom, dedicated hosts, BYOC/on-prem, VPC peering, 99.99% SLA.

## One-line positioning
"Machines that never sleep, microVMs for long-running apps, agents, and cronjobs, with live migration built in. Everyone else restarts your workload to move it; mashines.dev relocates it without stopping it."