Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to GCI, Fly.io like deployments with any VM
I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem. Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience. With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things! GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node). It can deploy on any machine that…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
Replicas▲239Hey HN! I'm Connor, creator of Replicas. I'm a heavy Codex/Claude Code user, and I wanted to hand off tasks to agents like I would to an engineer - kick something off before work, let it scaffold while I'm at lunch, even come back to a ready PR. The problem: existing alternatives use workspace VMs that are black boxes. I have no access to any of them - they can't run tests, read logs, or use tools like the Playwright MCP (which I use to verify agents actually fixed what they claim to fix). Replicas gives agents real cloud workspaces where they can: - Run your test suite and read the…
Jun 2026 · replicas.dev · its alternatives →
- 2
I've been working on CloudRouter, a skill + CLI that gives coding agents like Claude Code and Codex the ability to start cloud VMs and GPUs. When an agent writes code, it usually needs to start a dev server, run tests, open a browser to verify its work. Today that all happens on your local machine. This works fine for a single task, but the agent is sharing your computer: your ports, RAM, screen. If you run multiple agents in parallel, it gets a bit chaotic. Docker helps with isolation, but it still uses your machine's resources, and doesn't give the agent a browser, a desktop, or a GPU to…
Feb 2026 · cloudrouter.dev · its alternatives →
- 3WR
Hi HN, I previously wore SWE/SRE hats on GCP. Later, I was on the other side, managing thousands of machines. The friction points of onboarding and operating cloud systems are personal problems to me. I’ve found it hard to keep track of all the random cloud resources floating around, especially as my team’s assets proliferated. Occasionally, there is a resource affecting an outage but no one remembers where it is. I am constantly frustrated by existing tooling. APIs can work, after you’ve navigated the byzantine documentation, but I often find myself doing ad-hoc tasks which are best…
2022 · listvms.com · its alternatives →
- 4
I've built this to make it easy to host your own infra for lightweight VMs at large scale. Intended for exec of AI-generated code, for CICD runners, or for off-chain AI DApps. Mainly to avoid Docker-in-Docker dangers and mess. Super easy to use with CLI / Python SDK, friendly to AI engs who usually don't like to mess with VM orchestration and networking too much. Defense-in-depth philosophy. Would love to get feedback (and contributors: clear & exciting roadmap!), thx
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Sandboxes aren't enough. Give your agent a real computer and get back to building.
2017 · fly.io · its alternatives →
- 6
Leap▲112We just launched Leap, an AI developer agent that helps you build and deploy apps with real backends to your own AWS or GCP cloud. We built it because every AI app builder we tried fell short. They were fine for prototypes, but not for real systems. No support for proper backend infra, no isolated test environments, and sometimes shockingly no way to own your code. We build Leap to be more appropriate for developers: - Connect GitHub to put your code in a repo you control - Work with code generation using pull request–style revisions with diffs - Get Architecture diagrams and API docs for…
2025 · leap.new · its alternatives →
- 7
Maritime▲98Hi HN, my name is Maria, and I’m a co-founder of Maritime. We started Maritime at MIT to build infrastructure for companies that need to run thousands of isolated AI agents for their customers. Imagine you set up an agent like OpenClaw, or a personal assistant agent with a custom framework, and want to give a separate version of it to every customer/friend. Each customer needs their own agent running in an isolated microVM, with persistent state, secrets, triggers, and sleep/wake behavior. Building such scalable and secure infra will take you months and will cost hundreds of…
Mar 2026 · maritime.sh · its alternatives →
- 8
I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9RT
rx is a lightweight CLI and runtime that lets you deploy any function instantly as you save it in your editor. It’s fast, simple, and takes care of setting up all your cloud infrastructure. The best dev experience with everything you need built-in: - auth - permissions - payments - secrets - storage - logs - email & SMS - and way more Related beta launch tweet: https://x.com/KhalidZoabi/status/1777673531972608249 Wanted to show it to you guys, gauge interest, and get some feedback. There's a large roadmap of upcoming stuff. Feel free to DM me on X for more information!
2024 · rx.run · its alternatives →
- 10
Open-source agent runtime — SSH-native isolation, eBPF egress policy, Kubernetes + LXC backends, GPU passthrough, MCP-native CLI - FootprintAI/Containarium
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Aether▲26Since coding agents like Claude Code and Codex came out, I've been pretty obsessed with them. It's hard not to when you're getting a 20x discount on inference. I've also been frustrated by them a lot. I hated walking around with my laptop lid open while connected to a hotspot on my phone, having to tediously accept commands so I don't lose my root directory, and running out of RAM when running multiple agents that were spinning up dev servers in different worktrees at once. A lot of people would say existing cloud agents are the solution to this, as none of the above problems apply to any…
Jul 2026 · runaether.dev · its alternatives →
- 12
It uses claude code with GLM-6 model which is cheap yet powerful for most of the cases. for deployment Cloudflare Workers. It is a 2 weeks of hard work! Lemme know what you think!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13CB
Clink lets you use the coding agents you already pay for (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Z.ai GLM) to build → live-preview → ship apps in an isolated container. No token purchases, no extra cost for coding. Just link your existing Claude/OpenAI/Gemini account and start building and deploying instantly. Why we built this: Claude Code is our go-to for coding, but it lacked preview + deploy capabilities. We didn't want to pay Lovable again just for that. Different agents excel at different tasks - Claude Code for versatility, Codex for complex work, GLM for speed. We needed one…
2025 · clink.new · its alternatives →
- 14
Hey HN, As most of you (I think?), I cannot learn something without having a project, on the side, to implement what I’ve just learned. Recode is the project that I've used to learn Go. It lets you create a development environment in your cloud provider account easily. You can think of it as a desktop version of Gitpod / Coder / GitHub Codespaces less polished and with less features but 100% free and open-source. At the time of writing, it only works with Visual Studio Code and AWS. In order to let you configure your development environments easily, I’ve chosen to use Docker with…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15LV
Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh · its alternatives →
- 18
Been using it for about a year now in production, but rewrote it completely in golang. My first go project so far. I wanted to have something that would make my life easier. A lot of tools nowaday kinda push you towards functional deployments and that usually doesn't work for me since I like stuff like LiveView by Phoenix and Websocket stuff in general. Old vercel deployments back when they allowed to deploy docker containers was a godsend, but since they don't offer that anymore I had to use services like fly.io(which is amazing) or heroku. However I wanted something selfhosted that I could…
2024 · deploywithjig.askh.at · its alternatives →
- 19CA
Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status. Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights…
2025 · infrastructureas.ai · its alternatives →
- 20LL
Some time ago I built a simple app to run swarms of coding agents — I call it fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256389). It's based on centralized beads with a Python orchestrator and can run any coder (Claude, agy, Codex). Recently I added a UI to manage the whole agent lifecycle: adding new tasks, monitoring running ones, and a chat interface built on MCP with a centralized SQLite DB. From the UI I can spawn agents to run in any directory, define dependencies on other tasks, and specify which coder/model should do the job. Today I can run 10–15 agents…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
- 21
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Coding agents made everything feel fast again - except managing release binaries. Operations like these should be real commands you can run from your terminal: - "Deploy the login fix to staging" - "What's the functional difference between production and staging?" - "Notify me when any security fix hits production" - "Promote Jen's last changes to staging" - "Share the new beta API SDK with the partners at Acme" That's what Fly does. Every time a CI run pushes artifacts to the Fly Registry, it creates a release - including the binaries produced, an AI-generated summary, captured…
Apr 2026 · jfrog.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I was tired of setting up my coding environment from scratch whenever I switched machines, and I wanted easy access to Goose AI (an OpenAI-powered coding assistant) without complex configuration. So this weekend I hacked together Goosecode Server - a dockerized VS Code that runs in the browser with the Goose AI agent pre-installed and configured. It's nothing fancy, just combining existing tools in a useful way. What's interesting is that beyond personal use, it can be integrated as a tool call for AI agents people are building. Since it's containerized with a standard interface, you can…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →