Agents

An agent is a persistent, isolated Linux VM running in the cloud. Each agent has dedicated CPU, RAM, and disk — no shared resources, no noisy neighbors. You access everything through your browser: terminal, code editor, and hosted sites.

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Creating an agent

Click New Agent in the dashboard.

1. Name — lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. Used in your agent’s public URL.
2. Size — Hermit Crab, King Crab, or Coconut Crab. See Agent Sizes & Specs for details.
3. Billing type — pay-as-you-go (hourly metering) or subscribe & save (flat monthly). You can switch this later.
4. Account — assign to your personal account or a team organization.

Provisioning takes about 30 seconds.

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Agent lifecycle

Agents move through these states:

provisioning → running ↔ stopped → destroying → deleted

• Provisioning — VM is being created. You’ll see progress steps in the dashboard.
• Running — VM is on. Terminal, editor, and hosted sites are accessible. Billed at the running rate (metered) or included in subscription.
• Stopped — VM is off, all files preserved. Billed at the paused rate (metered) or included in subscription. Start it again anytime.
• Destroying — VM and storage are being deleted. Cannot be cancelled.
• Deleted — Gone. Cannot be recovered.

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Starting and stopping

Use the dashboard controls to start and stop agents. Metered agents bill at a much lower paused rate when stopped — stop them when idle to save money.

Everything persists across stop/start cycles: files, installed packages, shell configs. Only /tmp and in-memory state are lost.

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Switching billing type

You can switch an agent between pay-as-you-go and subscribe & save directly from the dashboard. No need to clone.

• Metered → Subscription — requires an available subscription slot for your agent’s size.
• Subscription → Metered — frees up the subscription slot.

The switch takes effect immediately. See Pricing & Billing for rate details.

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Cloning

Clone an agent to create an exact copy — all files, installed packages, and configs.

• Clone to the same or a larger size. Cannot downsize.
• Choose any billing type for the clone, independent of the source.
• The source agent is briefly stopped during the volume fork, then restarted automatically.

Cloning is useful for upgrading to more resources, branching an experiment, or creating a template. See the Cloning guide for details.

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Team organizations

Agents belong to an account — either your personal account or a team organization. All billing, LLM keys, and GlampHub publishing are scoped to the account.

Create an organization from the dashboard to share billing and agents across team members. See For Teams for details.

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Destroying

Click Destroy in the dashboard. This permanently deletes the VM, all storage, and all data. Billing stops immediately. Cannot be undone.

Destroying an agent does not delete any Glamps published from it — those are independent.