Amp has introduced Boxes: always-on computers for the apps people build with its coding agent. The 10 November announcement describes a box as a small virtual machine that stays up, serves each app at its own URL, and comes with an Amp agent running on it.
“That’s what boxes are: a home for what you build with your agents.”
— Amp, in Boxes
You still build in orbs, Amp’s machines for a single coding thread, and preview work in portals. When you’re ready, you ask the agent to spawn a box and deploy to it. A box is one virtual machine — Amp says Ubuntu 24.04 with a 20 GB disk — and it can run several applications at once. Each app gets its own address, such as https://bug-tracker--acme.onamp.dev, and can later use a custom domain. The box is permanent, stays on unless you stop it or set a daily schedule, and you can deploy to it again from as many orbs as you want.
Amp describes a box as “just a computer,” without containers or other layers in the default setup, on the grounds that agents are already good at using ordinary machines. The docs also say you can install Docker and run containers if you want to. Apps on the same box get their own Linux user, URL, secrets and data directory, but they share the machine’s CPU, memory, disk and network. Amp says that is not a security boundary, and that you should only put apps together if you would trust each of them with the others’ data.
Every box includes its own Amp runner, so you can start a thread on the live machine to check logs, fix data or change a running app. In the launch post, Thorsten Ball, who works on Amp, demonstrates deploying an application and then editing its production data by talking to the agent on the box. You can share a box with a workspace so teammates can deploy new versions. App URLs are public by default; a private deploy asks visitors to sign in with Amp. Boxes have no public IP address, so you cannot SSH into one — you start a thread, or use Amp’s command-line tools, instead.
Boxes are billed by the minute. A stopped box costs nothing. The launch post lists these Personal and Team prices; Amp notes that prices shown in Ball’s video are for the Enterprise plan, and that Personal and Team boxes are cheaper. The docs add that Enterprise workspaces pay for boxes at their Amp orb rate, and that Amp Free’s daily credits do not pay for boxes.
| Size | Machine | Per hour | 30 days, always on | 30 days, 6am to 9pm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
b1.tiny | 0.5 vCPU (bursts to 2), 2 GB | US$0.025 | US$18 | US$11.25 |
b1.small (default) | 1 vCPU (bursts to 2), 4 GB | US$0.042 | US$30 | US$18.75 |
b1.medium | 2 vCPUs, 8 GB | US$0.069 | US$50 | US$31.25 |
b1.large | 4 vCPUs, 16 GB | US$0.139 | US$100 | US$62.50 |
Creating a box needs at least US$2 of credits, the same as starting an orb. If the payer runs out of credits, Amp sends an email and the box stops 24 hours later, with its disk and data kept. Each box can send 100 GB of network traffic a month; at the limit, Amp stops it until the next month begins. You cannot change the size of an existing box: to move up or down, you create a new one and copy the data across.
Quinn Slack, Amp’s chief executive, wrote that once you can deploy and run something inside Amp, “for most people, nothing” is being replaced — “it’s new.”
“When you build something in Amp, you can now deploy and run it in Amp, too.”
— Quinn Slack, in a post on the Boxes launch
To get started, Amp says you should ask your agent to create a personal box and deploy an application to it. The Boxes docs cover configuration, schedules, secrets and the command-line tools.
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