Four questions, then a short list

Answer in your own terms. The list below updates as you go: providers that cannot do the job are left out and say why, the rest are ordered by how easy they are for you and then by price.

Runs in your browserSame prices as the calculatorNothing is sent anywhere

1 What will the agent do? Run a Hermes agent Run an OpenClaw agent Give a coding agent its own machine Run code inside your own product Run a browser or computer-use agent Host your own n8n Host your own Discord or Slack bot Give a small team Claude Code in the cloud Run a scraper on a schedule Host your own MCP server Something else

2 Are you comfortable typing commands in a terminal? No, I want to click through a website I can copy and paste instructions Yes

3 When does it need to be running? All the time, so it can answer whenever I message it During working hours An hour or two a day

4 What can you spend on the machine each month? Under $10 Under $30 Under $100 Whatever it takes

Why the others were left out

One personal agent that stays on all day can also live on a plain rented server for less. Do you even need a sandbox?

About this guide

Prices checked 29 October 2026, capabilities 29 October 2026, provider profiles 28 October 2026. Documentation and published prices only; no sandbox was started or billed. Every claim carries a source link and a provenance tag. How we checked. Unfamiliar word? See the glossary.

Spotted a wrong price or an out-of-date claim? Report something wrong (opens a GitHub issue for this page; needs a free GitHub account).

16 providers, 16 features. The cost calculator follows the approach of battleships.dev, the price-comparison dataset built by the Boat team, with thanks; its rates here are re-read from each provider's own pages. How the two differ.

For AI agents and scripts: llms.txt and the same data as plain JSON and Markdown. Who runs this guide: About Bot Perch.