Plans, seats, and box-hours

Your boxes.dev plan covers the cloud machines where you work. Each plan includes an allowance of machine time, measured in box-hours, and sets per-person limits on how many projects you can have and how many of your devboxes can be awake at once. Your connected Codex or Claude subscription or API usage is separate.

What a box-hour measures

One default devbox with 4 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory awake for one hour uses one box-hour. Two default devboxes awake for an hour use two box-hours. Your Template box also uses box-hours while awake, even though it does not count toward your awake-devbox limit. Sleeping machines do not use active box-hours.

Self-serve plans

A paid seat is plan access that a team admin assigns to one person. Each paid seat receives its own included box-hours each billing period, and the awake-devbox and project limits apply to each person separately. After a user has used their included allowance, further usage draws from the team's shared prepaid credits at $0.75 per box-hour on Starter or $0.60 on Pro. Team and enterprise arrangements may have different limits. Check Billing for your team's plan and your usage.

The trial is per user and starts when you first use a machine. Some teams need to add a payment method before starting; Billing will show whether one is required. If you started without a card, a later payment-method requirement will not interrupt your remaining trial. Once your trial ends or you use its allowance, a team admin needs to assign you a paid seat or update billing before you can start or wake machines again.

Reaching your project limit will block setup of another project. See Resolve a limit for your options.

The plan chooser shows the included box-hours, awake capacity, and overage rate. Select the image to enlarge it.

Awake capacity and sleeping

Your awake-devbox limit controls how many devboxes you can use at the same time. Sleeping devboxes remain available to wake later and do not occupy an awake slot. Devboxes also sleep automatically after inactivity; see Sleep, wake, and recover a devbox.

If you reach the limit while creating or waking a devbox, moving a thread to a new devbox, or sending a message from a sleeping devbox, boxes.dev will ask you to sleep another devbox. Choose one that is idle: sleeping a devbox will pause any agent or other work running on it. The chooser lists idle candidates first. Automations also need an available slot.

A devbox awake only for boxes.dev maintenance does not use your box-hours or awake capacity. It may appear awake in your machine list, but it will not appear in the chooser. Connecting to it for your own work will use an awake slot and start consuming box-hours again.

Larger machines

Larger machines use more box-hours for the same time awake:

For example, an 8 vCPU / 16 GiB machine awake for three hours uses six box-hours. These rates apply to both included usage and prepaid credits. If boxes.dev changes your team's configured resources, the change will apply to newly created Template boxes; it will not resize existing machines.

Team Template usage

While you edit a Team Template as an admin, its editing machine will use your box-hours. The shared saved source normally sleeps; brief maintenance and update wakes use a team admin's box-hours and do not occupy a member's devbox slot or create another project. These source wakes are billed; maintenance wakes on your ordinary devboxes are free.

A Member project has no personal Template box. boxes.dev can prepare devboxes in advance so the member's first thread starts quickly. These machines wait asleep without using box-hours or awake capacity. Once assigned and awake, they count like that member's other devboxes. Creating a project from a Team Template still uses a normal project slot.

Use Manage billing and usage to inspect usage or resolve a payment, seat, or credit block.