Comparison · 25 Aug 2026
DevRig vs. building it yourself: an honest cost sheet
We sell against DIY, so you should get the comparison from us straight — including the rows we lose.
Where DIY wins, stated first
A $24/month droplet gives you more disk than our $19 Rig — and more than our $29 one. If disk is your binding constraint, a self-managed VPS is the better buy at every rung, full stop. DIY also wins if you enjoy operating servers (a real preference, not a strawman), if you need a distro or kernel we don't offer, or if your workload needs GPUs — we don't have them.
The backup line changes the arithmetic
An agent with root on a machine can destroy that machine, so backups aren't optional in this workload — they're the difference between an anecdote and a lost week. Turn on the provider's daily backups and the $24 droplet is $31.20/month: more than our Pro tier, for a restore point that's up to a day old. Every Rig ships continuous snapshots with rollback, included, because we won't sell an agent machine without them.
RAM is what agent workloads actually buy
Agents are memory-hungry — language servers, builds, test runners, browsers. Per GB of RAM: our Starter is $3.17 and Pro is $2.42, against roughly $5.00–8.75/GB across the managed dev-environment field. We can price there because Rigs are microVMs packed onto dedicated hardware we operate, not resold hyperscaler instances.
Always-on math vs. per-second platforms
Per-second billing looks cheap until the machine never sleeps, and "an agent I can reach anytime" means the machine never sleeps. A 4-core Codespace left running around the clock lands near $265/month. On per-second infrastructure platforms, RAM alone commonly runs ~$5/GB/month and persistent volumes bill whether or not the machine is up — by our math, past roughly 6.5 hours of active agent time a day, our $29 Pro is cheaper even if you grant the platform perfect scale-to-zero. And around-the-clock availability is the product here.
The row that isn't on the invoice
The DIY column has a cost that never shows up in the provider's calculator: you, operating. Initial provisioning and hardening is an evening or two. The recurring part — updates, disk pressure, key hygiene, testing that the backups actually restore — is small, constant, and interrupt-shaped. Price your hour at anything and the comparison stops being close. Price it at zero and DIY wins; that's a legitimate answer too, and some of you will take it.
What we'd tell a friend
Enjoy running servers, or need the disk or a GPU? Build it — here's our own recipe. Want the machine to be someone else's job while you use the agent? That's the product. DevRig opens in October at $19/$29/$79, always-on, your own model account, no token markup. The waitlist locks those prices.