There are several honest ways to run an AI agent, and they solve different problems. Here is the landscape as we see it, including where plori is not the right choice.
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| Option | What it is | State between sessions | Cost while idle | Who operates it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| plori | A managed computer per agent, with the agent included | Persistent by default: disk and memory survive between sessions | Zero. Idle agents scale to zero; plan disk is free | plori runs it; you talk to it or drive it over MCP |
| Sandbox APIs (E2B, Daytona, Modal) | Infrastructure primitives for executing code from your own app | Ephemeral sessions; persistence is snapshots or storage you wire up | Depends on what you keep warm and stored | You build and operate the agent around the sandbox |
| A VPS you manage | A general server you rent and administer | Persistent, and entirely yours to maintain | The full server price, 24/7, working or not | You: install, isolate, update, monitor, secure |
| Your own laptop | The agent as a local process | Persistent while that machine lives and stays yours | Free, but the agent stops when the lid closes | You, and only while you are online |
| Agent inside an IDE or SaaS | An assistant feature of another product | Scoped to that product's sessions and workspace | Bundled in that product's subscription | The vendor, inside their workflow only |
The structural difference: sandbox APIs and servers are places where your software runs; plori is a place where your agent lives. If you are building a product, you likely want the former. If you want a working agent today, with persistent files, memory, and unattended work built in, that is what plori is for.
It depends on who builds and who operates. If you are shipping code execution inside your own product, a sandbox API like E2B or Modal is the right primitive. If you want an agent working for you without building or operating anything, a managed platform like plori is the shortest path: the agent, its computer, persistence, and billing come as one thing you talk to.
When you are embedding code execution into your own application at scale (use a sandbox API), when policy requires everything on-premises or fully local, or when all you want is autocomplete-style help inside an editor. plori is for agents that work as durable colleagues, not for infrastructure you resell.
A sandbox gives your code a place to run for a session. plori gives an agent a computer to live on: the disk, installed tools, and memory persist between conversations, the agent sleeps in place at zero compute cost, and scheduling plus background work come built in.
You can, and you will own isolation, updates, secrets handling, and monitoring, and pay for every idle hour. A VPS bills around the clock; a plori agent bills only while it works. The trade is control for operations: a VPS is fully yours, plori is fully managed.
Your agent's files are plain files: browse and download them from the files panel anytime, or ask the agent to push work to your own git remotes and storage as it goes. There is no proprietary workspace format holding the work.
No, it complements it. IDE assistants excel at the tight loop with you present; a plori agent covers unattended work: long jobs, scheduled runs, background builds. Over MCP your IDE agent can even delegate to a plori agent directly.