Crusoe vs Hyperstack
Crusoe and Hyperstack are both GPU clouds that also rent plain CPU VMs you set up yourself. The big differences are which GPUs they carry, where they run, and what happens when you stop a VM: on Crusoe it only keeps paying for its disk, on Hyperstack it keeps billing at the full rate unless you hibernate it.
The companies and products
Crusoe
Crusoe calls itself "the AI factory company": it builds energy-first data centers and rents GPU and CPU machines on Crusoe Cloud.
Crusoe Cloud is infrastructure for training and serving models: Nvidia and AMD GPU VMs, general-purpose and storage CPU VMs, disks, managed Kubernetes and Slurm, and managed inference. You create Ubuntu VMs through a console, CLI, Terraform or API, log in over SSH and install what you need. It is not a sandbox product, so this page compares the CPU VMs where it overlaps with bochka.
Hyperstack
Hyperstack is the GPU cloud of NexGen Cloud, a UK company founded in 2020: you rent GPU and CPU virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and storage by the minute.
A Hyperstack VM is a full virtual machine with root and SSH, booted from an Ubuntu image (with or without Docker) and sized from a fixed list of flavors, from one RTX A4000 to 8-GPU B300 nodes, plus CPU-only flavors from 4 to 32 vCPUs. It also runs managed Kubernetes, volumes, object storage and an AI Studio inference API. It is built for teams that train, fine-tune and serve models, not as a sandbox API for agents, so this page compares the parts that overlap: VMs as machines for agent work.
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “43rd cheapest of 364” means 42 of the other 363 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | Crusoe: price rank | Hyperstack: price rank | bochka: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Both give a coding agent a plain VM with root and Docker, but neither has a desktop, built-in agents or a fork of a running machine; bochka has all three on every sandbox. | 232nd of 367, with limits $2,996 a month | 343rd of 367, with limits $11,458 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An agent that runs all month fits on both as a VM you watch yourself; Crusoe comes out far lower than Hyperstack here, and bochka adds a desktop and a browser. | 234th of 366, with limits $3,000 a month | 337th of 366, with limits $12,775 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month | 128th of 345, with limits $268 a month | 172nd of 345, with limits $1,167 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Neither has HTTPS URLs for each machine, and Hyperstack does not publish how many VMs can run at once, so 300 user sandboxes is not confirmed there. | 104th of 361, with limits $951 a month | 173rd of 361, with limits $4,207 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 71st of 360, with limits $4,055 a month | 173rd of 360, with limits $17,500 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month Crusoe fits agent evals fully, while Hyperstack's unconfirmed limit on VMs at once makes it a compromise; bochka fits too and starts each sandbox from a snapshot. | 43rd cheapest of 364 $811 a month | 204th of 364, with limits $3,250 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month Both fit for build and test jobs on full VMs; Crusoe bills per second and Hyperstack per minute. | 48th cheapest of 377 $395 a month | 122nd cheapest of 377 $1,560 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Both keep the whole disk; a stopped Crusoe VM pays only for its OS disk, while a Hyperstack VM must be hibernated to stop paying for compute. | 87th cheapest of 368 $121 a month | 115th cheapest of 368 $475 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Neither ships a graphical desktop, so a computer-use agent means installing and streaming one yourself; bochka ships a 60fps desktop with Chromium. | 221st of 369, with limits $811 a month | 332nd of 369, with limits $3,250 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month | 246th of 367, with limits $405 a month | 335th of 367, with limits $1,750 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 268th of 346, with limits $403 a month | 327th of 346, with limits $1,750 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 201st of 338, with limits $8,055 a month | 310th of 338, with limits $35,000 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 201st of 360, with limits $207 a month | 309th of 360, with limits $876 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month Hyperstack ranks 2nd of 98 for GPU eval jobs, well ahead of Crusoe, and bochka has no GPUs. | 86th of 98, with limits $7,803 a month | 2nd cheapest of 98 $625 a month | Can't run it |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Crusoe | Hyperstack | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A plain Ubuntu VM you set up yourself, plus GPUs, Kubernetes and Slurm | A plain Ubuntu VM you set up yourself, plus GPUs, Kubernetes, volumes and object storage | A sandbox for agents: a full VM with tools, a desktop and coding agents ready |
| Isolation | Full VM on cloud-hypervisor | Full VM, on flavors mapped 1:1 to physical resources | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Root, Docker and nested virtualization | sudo user (root login deprecated); Docker preinstalled on GPU images; nested virtualization not documented | Root and SSH; Ubuntu images with or without Docker | Root, systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Stopped machines | No compute charge when stopped; the 128 GB OS disk keeps billing until the VM is deleted | A stopped VM bills at the full rate; hibernation bills only disk and a kept IP, and a restore needs the flavor in stock | A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its whole disk |
| Snapshots | No snapshots of disks or running VMs; a custom image of the boot disk while the VM is shut off | Snapshots on request, with the VM shut off, one at a time, up to 100 GB | Disk snapshotted every minute and on stop, while the sandbox keeps running |
| Fork | Boot new VMs from a custom image, in the same project and region | No fork; snapshot, make a custom image and deploy a new VM | Fork a running sandbox into a new one with the same disk |
| Desktop and computer use | None; install and stream a desktop yourself | SSH and text console logs; no graphical desktop | 60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control |
| Coding agents | None; an MCP server lets an assistant inspect your Crusoe infrastructure | None; a hosted MCP server lets your own agent manage Hyperstack | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping keys out of the machine | No credentials proxy; secrets live on the VM | No credentials proxy; keys go in with cloud-init, files or environment variables | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Reaching the machine | Public IPv4, static or dynamic; TCP and UDP load balancers; no managed HTTPS URLs | A public IPv4 you can keep static; open ports with firewall rules and run your own TLS | Token-protected HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Network rules | VPC firewall with allow rules by IP, port and protocol, in and out | Per-VM firewall: inbound closed by default, outbound rules by IP, protocol and port | Open internet out; inbound through HTTPS URLs and TCP ports |
| GPUs | Nvidia L40S to GB200, plus AMD MI300X and MI355X; on-demand, spot or reserved | Nvidia RTX A4000 to H100, H200, B200 and B300; on-demand, spot or reserved | None |
| Billing | Per second while running, no plan fee, no data transfer charges today | Per minute from a prepaid balance, no bandwidth charges | Monthly plan from $20, all of it usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes |
| Regions | US (Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada) and EU (Iceland, Norway) | Norway, Canada (Quebec) and the US (Texas) | EU only: Germany, Finland, France |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Crusoe | Hyperstack | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | Not published | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | No | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Yes | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | Yes | Yes | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | No | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | No |
| GPU | Yes | Yes | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | Yes | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | No | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | Not published | No |
| SSO | Yes | No | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable CPU measurement for Crusoe or Hyperstack: neither was in the StarSling hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run we use. bochka did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that run, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) hosts. Crusoe's general-purpose CPU VMs run on AMD Genoa or Turin processors.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Crusoe and Hyperstack have no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | Crusoe, a month | Hyperstack, a month | bochka, a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $32 · On-demand | $114 · Prepaid on-demand | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $121 · On-demand | $475 · Prepaid on-demand | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $1,488 · On-demand | $5,720 · Prepaid on-demand | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $405 · On-demand | $1,750 · Prepaid on-demand · with limits | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $811 · On-demand | $3,500 · Prepaid on-demand · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Crusoe: Crusoe bills each VM per second while it runs, at a flat rate per vCPU that includes 4 GB of memory per vCPU, and every VM also pays for a 128 GB OS disk each month, running or stopped. It has no plan fee and does not charge for data transfer today.
Hyperstack: Hyperstack bills a running VM per minute from a prepaid balance, at a fixed hourly price per flavor, with no bandwidth charges. A stopped VM keeps billing in full, so the totals assume you hibernate it between runs.
Hyperstack: You pick a monthly plan from $20, and all of it becomes usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its whole disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Neither sells a 4 vCPU / 8 GB CPU VM: the scenarios use Crusoe's 4 vCPU / 16 GB machine and Hyperstack's 8 vCPU / 8 GB flavor, so part of the price gap is size. Crusoe sets CPU and GPU quotas per project and raises them through support, so 50 agents or 300 user sandboxes may need a ticket first. Hyperstack publishes no limit on VMs at once, so 300 user sandboxes and 1,000 short jobs at once are not confirmed there. On bochka the limit is a sandbox count plus starts per minute, so the 1,000-job burst gets queued and needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows.
| Scenario | Crusoe | Hyperstack | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays | None that bite | None that bite | None that bite |
| One agent that never stops | None that bite | None that bite | None that bite |
| 50 agents in parallel | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| Sandboxes for your users | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once | None that bite |
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Crusoe when
you need AMD GPUs or Nvidia GB200, Slurm and shared disks for cluster jobs, or CPU VMs that cost little while stopped.
- AMD GPUs and the newest Nvidia racks. If you want AMD MI300X or MI355X, or Nvidia GB200, Crusoe rents them; Hyperstack lists only Nvidia.
- Cheaper to leave stopped. For VMs that sit idle between jobs, a stopped Crusoe VM pays only for its OS disk, with no hibernate step.
- Slurm and shared disks. For cluster jobs, Crusoe adds Slurm images and shared network disks next to managed Kubernetes.
Use Hyperstack when
you want a wide range of Nvidia cards by the minute, a region in Canada, or snapshots you take by hand.
- A wide range of Nvidia cards. For GPU evals and fine-tuning, Hyperstack rents single cards from an RTX A4000 up to 8-GPU B300 nodes, by the minute.
- Canada as well as the US and Norway. If your data or users are in Canada, Hyperstack has a region in Quebec; Crusoe lists no Canadian region.
- Snapshots you can take by hand. If you want to save a VM's disk now and then, Hyperstack takes snapshots on request, with the VM shut off.
Where bochka fits
If what you are really running is agents, not model training, both Crusoe and Hyperstack hand you a bare Ubuntu VM and leave the rest to you. bochka gives each agent a full VM that saves itself every minute, forks while running, and comes with a desktop, coding agents, HTTPS hosting and a keys proxy. Keep GPU work on Crusoe or Hyperstack and run the agent's workspace on bochka.
Work that saves itself and forks live
An agent that breaks its machine needs a recent copy to roll back to. Crusoe can only image a shut-off boot disk, and Hyperstack snapshots by hand with the VM off, so both halt the agent to save or branch it.
Free stops with the whole disk kept
Agents sit idle between tasks. A stopped Hyperstack VM bills in full unless you hibernate it and hope its flavor is in stock to restore; a stopped Crusoe VM still pays for its OS disk.
A desktop, agents and keys handled for you
Neither ships a desktop, coding agents or a credentials proxy, so you build a desktop stream, install each agent, write the code that drives it, and leave keys on a machine the agent's code can read.
Use bochka when your agents write and run code for hours on a full VM that saves itself every minute, forks while running, costs nothing while stopped, and comes with a desktop, HTTPS URLs and coding agents built in. Compare it one to one: bochka vs Crusoe and bochka vs Hyperstack.
Questions people ask
Is Crusoe cheaper than Hyperstack?
For CPU agent work in our scenarios, yes: one coding agent on workdays comes to $32 a month on Crusoe and $114 on Hyperstack, one agent running all month to $121 versus $475, and 50 agents in parallel to $1,488 versus $5,720. The VM sizes differ, so part of the gap is size. On bochka the same three come to $20, $26 and $317 a month.
Which is faster, Crusoe or Hyperstack?
We have no comparable CPU measurement for either one: neither was in the StarSling benchmark run we use. bochka did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that run.
Do stopped VMs cost money on Crusoe and Hyperstack?
On Crusoe a stopped VM has no compute charge, but its 128 GB OS disk bills until you delete the VM. On Hyperstack a stopped VM bills at the full rate; a hibernated one bills only its disk and any kept IP, and restoring it needs the flavor in stock. A stopped bochka sandbox costs nothing.
Can Crusoe and Hyperstack run Docker?
Yes. Both are full VMs: Crusoe has Docker preinstalled on its GPU images, and Hyperstack's Ubuntu images come with or without Docker. bochka sandboxes come with Docker, Docker Compose, systemd and /dev/kvm ready.
Which has better GPUs for evals?
In our GPU eval scenario Hyperstack ranks 2nd of 98 at $625 a month, against $7,803 for Crusoe. Crusoe carries AMD MI300X and MI355X and Nvidia GB200, which Hyperstack does not list. bochka has no GPUs.
Where do Crusoe and Hyperstack run?
Crusoe runs in the US (Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada) and in Iceland and Norway. Hyperstack runs in Norway, Quebec and Texas. bochka runs only in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France.
Try bochka
Install the CLI, then run bochka new.
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