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 :)
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).
> People run a pilot agent that scopes work and delegates it to sub-agents, each on its own VM: shape a project with the pilot, and the workers implement it and open PRs. One customer runs hundreds of machines at once, spun up and torn down from the CLI.
Are people spawning VMs for every tool call? If so, would love to understand why so, and why containers are not a good fit?
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.
The Profiles idea is the interesting part. Injection at creation is the easy half; the hard half is revocation mid-session. If a credential in a profile rotates or gets pulled while a box is up for days, does the running VM keep the old value until restart? For long horizon agents that window is where the risk actually lives.
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.
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).
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.
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! 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.
Basic question:
What are you doing here that my agent couldn't do with: AWS, GCP, Hetzner, DigitialOcean?
Quick read is this is some simple api abstraction? or you're even brokering that compute? Which i would want, why?
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 :)
This seems like something that could exist as free software and can be easily vibecoded in the form of a pile of scripts. Thanks for the idea!
Could say the same about v1 of OpenRouter which Stripe is acquiring for $7B this week;) [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381
You can't vibecode your way to their market capture.
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).
Dropbox-esque?
> People run a pilot agent that scopes work and delegates it to sub-agents, each on its own VM: shape a project with the pilot, and the workers implement it and open PRs. One customer runs hundreds of machines at once, spun up and torn down from the CLI.
Are people spawning VMs for every tool call? If so, would love to understand why so, and why containers are not a good fit?
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.
The Profiles idea is the interesting part. Injection at creation is the easy half; the hard half is revocation mid-session. If a credential in a profile rotates or gets pulled while a box is up for days, does the running VM keep the old value until restart? For long horizon agents that window is where the risk actually lives.
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.
When you say suspendible, do you mean that I could make a VM, configure it by installing packages and libraries, then pause it?
And resume it later with the full disk ready to go? No billing during the inbetween time?
That’d be huge, but seems wild. How can you economically keep the storage between active sessions?
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).
Docs here: https://docs.machine0.io/examples/nixos
I’m currently using Modal for my GPU training workload, how does this differ?
What does this give me that fly.io sprites does not give me?
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!
Can you give me a practical example of 3 most deserving use cases? Something that customers are actually using them for today.
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.
What's the roadmap? Any plans for swarm specific tooling, or an backend marketplace (eg aws, hetzner etc).
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.
What is the hardest part of building this for you?
I have a payments background. So maintaining a very high bar on security, reliability and performance as usage scales is super important.
Does this internally use AWS or is this your own self-hosted environment?
Hi! It sits on top of DigitalOcean. We also have BYOC on the roadmap.
This gives you the best of both worlds: agent native, CLI-first DX with the reliability and performance of a traditional cloud.
What made you choose digital ocean?
YC gives DO credits for startups.
Their machines are good & they have a partnership program that's fast and compatible with the model.
>machine0 provides on-demand cloud virtual machines accessible via a command-line interface and web dashboard. VMs run on DigitalOcean infrastructure.
Well, given DigitalOceans already inflated prices, this certainly won't be cheap.
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.
The funny thing is that DO itself has an MCP for spinning up VMs, resolving IPs, etc.