No CRIU. Snapshots are at the disk layer, not RAM.
`machine0 suspend` takes a full disk snapshot and tears down the compute;
you keep paying only for storage. `machine0 start` restores the disk and
cold-boots the VM from it. So processes restart, they don't resume
mid-execution. Practically: anything that survives a reboot survives a suspend.
Ohh nice catch! I'll update to the latest version and republish the base images tomorrow. But in the meantime, you can also just rebuild with the flakes: https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos
Modal is an ephemeral sandbox, whereas machine0 is a persistent VM you own: root, your own driver/CUDA/kernel, GPU passed straight through, and a fixed GPU per size.
Hi! OAuth token refresh is handled within the profile, and will automatically get picked up by agents using it. If you actually want to pull or rotate a credential, you can do that too and re-inject.
The pattern that's increasingly common is having a pilot or orchestrator agent sitting on top of the fleet that manages this.
The profile-plus-orchestrator pattern is a clean answer, and re-inject existing at all puts you ahead of most setups I have seen. The remaining edge: a process that read the credential at boot still holds the old value in memory after a pull. Is re-inject a workload restart, or does something force consumers to re-read? That is the part I have never seen solved cleanly without short TTLs.
Hi! No not for every tool call. People are spinning up VMs for tasks that require sustained compute for hours or days. For example, they’ll deploy an agent with tools and a prompt to take an entire feature from spec to PR. Or an auto-research loop to improve the performance of an inference model.
Hi! We're not the cheapest compute on the market. But we are cheaper than most sandbox providers / neoclouds. And customers are happy to pay for agent first DX coupled with the performance and reliability you expect from an established cloud.
Yes, we're building more tooling around fleets, starting with profiles that let you manage named sets of credentials and MCP tools outside of the VM. We're also looking to support more backends and also BYOC.
Hi! You get GPUs, much bigger machines and full control of the VM down to the drivers, kernel etc. It's also a lot cheaper, especially for compute intensive workloads. Also, if you're running agents in the VMs, you get native support for credential and MCP tool injection via profiles. We support NixOS too!
Hi! Sure: (1) running agent fleets for software factories, (2) Model training and RL environments orchestrated by agents and (3) as a backend for agentic products and platforms.
You can totally ask an agent to orchestrate an existing cloud. But their APIs weren't designed for agentic orchestration, so it'll be more expensive in terms of context / turns (machine0 grammar is simple: new, ls, rm...).
The other thing is if you're running large workloads that span many machines (e.g. software factories, model training or RL environments), then over time you'll end up with orphaned artifacts that will need to be maintained (think security groups, volumes, elastic IPs etc).
Ultimately, most of our customers today just want to be able to spin up a powerful & reliable VM without worrying about DevOps or any other kind of maintenance :)
But, I don’t think this is your strongest argument. The APIs for those providers are pretty easy to orchestrate and don’t take that many tokens to use. (Especially if you are hosting on top of one of these providers)
Instead, I think some strengths you could focus on are (a) not being one of those providers, (b) having a better product mix that people want to use, and (c) keeping a minimal design. Clear use-cases, minimal friction, easy to keep the model in your head.
You definitely have a good product here with plenty of reasons to choose you. But your minimal API isn’t a great moat.
OpenRouter is valuable because it has a large catalogue of competing providers for a fungible service. This does the opposite (lock in with a specific vendor).
Hi! Yes that's right. Sorry if it wasn't clear, but you do pay for storage. Cost is nominal compared to compute ($0.078/GB/month).
The other option is to define your entire environment as code using nix (we have native NixOS support). For example, you can use an agent to author code which declares everything on your machine: packages, libraries, shell, vim config... And then you can take that code and use it to rebuild a new VM on machine0 whenever you like (or somewhere else).
`machine0 suspend` takes a full disk snapshot and tears down the compute; you keep paying only for storage. `machine0 start` restores the disk and cold-boots the VM from it. So processes restart, they don't resume mid-execution. Practically: anything that survives a reboot survives a suspend.