Overview

Freestyle VMs are hyper-fast isolated sandboxes, designed as tiny workbenches for AI models or deployments. They provide clean ephemeral environments or can act as lightweight caches that are easily deleted and recreated. Every VM runs in secure isolation, with comprehensive logging and auditing built in for transparency. Sessions are persistent when needed, supporting pause/resume workflows, while cost optimization tools ensure efficiency. Purpose-built for modern AI workflows, Freestyle VMs combine speed, security, and flexibility to fit diverse usage patterns.

We have a system to fork running VMs in <50ms — getting a full copy with the exact same memory and state. We also provide optional configuration to treat VMs as ephemeral, or as caches that can be deleted and recreated frequently; this has huge implications for cost savings and speed.

Unique Functionality

Freestyle VMs are designed for unique usage patterns that set them apart from more traditional virtual machine providers.

• Super-fast forking: Create a full copy of a running VM in less than 50ms, preserving memory and state.
• Ephemeral or cache modes: Configure VMs to be short-lived or act as lightweight caches. By semantically noting VMs are ephemeral or cache, we can make their startup times faster by running them on specific hardware.
• Persistent sessions: Support pause/resume workflows with session persistence.
• Auto waking on request: When a request comes in to a stopped VM, it will automatically be started instantly and handle the request.
• Web Previews on Multiple Ports: We currently support not just the 443 HTTPS preview that is standard in the industry, but also 8081 on HTTP (this makes us the ideal choice for Mobile App Builders).
• Cost optimization: Built-in tools to minimize expenses based on usage patterns.
• AI-focused: Tailored for modern AI workloads requiring speed and flexibility.

When to Use Freestyle VMs

Freestyle VMs are best suited for scenarios when you need computers for your AI workloads. They come with a whole filesystem and a full OS, so they are great for:

• Workbenches for AI App Builders to run dev servers and iterate on apps
• Running Coding AI models like Claude Code, Open Code or Gemini CLI in secure isolated environments
• Hosting web apps, APIs and databases with fast startup needs.
• Running browser agents that want to fork a browser inside
• Running ephemeral jobs with an external source of truth (like Git)

When Not to Use Freestyle VMs

Freestyle has four offerings with some overlap with VMs.

VMs are a best in class VM offering, but Freestyle offers specialized tools for a series of usecases that handle them even better.

• Dev Servers are pre-configured development environments that can be started in seconds. They take advantage of cache VMs to create instant, cheap, self healing environments for AI development environments.
• Web Deploy is a serverless deployment platform for deploying JavaScript and TypeScript apps. If you can compile your app to just TypeScript or JavaScript, and don't need to iterate on it, this is the API for you. It is incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and comes with a whole series of advanced featuress that make it the best choice for deploying web apps.
• Execute is a serverless code execution platform for running short lived functions. If you can run your code in a few seconds, don't need a full OS and don't need to run binaries, this is the API for you. It is incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and comes with a whole series of advanced featuress that make it the best choice for running serverless code.
• Git is a git hosting platform. If you need to store code, version it and need high reliability high speed storage — this is it. Git is often used for source control alongside our VMs.