Daytona

Daytona is infrastructure for running AI-generated code safely. It spins up isolated sandboxes in under 90 milliseconds, so an agent can execute what it writes without touching your host machine.

What is Daytona?

Daytona is an open-source project that gives developers a fast way to create throwaway compute environments. The target audience is anyone building coding agents, code interpreters or evaluation pipelines. You call its SDK, get a sandbox, run code, and tear it down. It supports Python, TypeScript, and custom images.

Product Features

• Fast startup: sub-90ms sandbox creation, faster than a full container cold start.
• Stateful sandboxes: keep files and processes alive between calls.
• Any language: run Python, Node, Go or a custom Docker image.
• Open source: self-host the whole control plane.
• SDKs: Python and TypeScript clients with a REST API underneath.

Product Highlights

Speed is the whole point. If you are running thousands of agent test cases, a two-second container boot is the difference between a quick eval and an overnight job. Daytona is built for that throughput.

It is a developer tool, not a finished product — expect to write code against its API. Self-hosting needs real infrastructure work, and the managed cloud is metered, so runaway agent loops can get expensive fast.

Use Cases

• Running untrusted AI-generated code in isolation.
• Building a code interpreter for a chatbot product.
• Evaluating coding agents across many test cases.
• CI jobs that need a clean environment per run.
• Teaching environments where students need disposable machines.

Is Daytona free?

The open-source version is free to self-host with no per-sandbox fee. The managed cloud has a free allowance and then usage-based billing, priced on sandbox time and resources.

Quick Summary

• Daytona provides fast sandboxes for agent code execution.
• Sub-90ms startup is its headline number.
• Open source and self-hostable.
• Cloud tier is metered; loops can get costly.