Sandboxd
Open-source AI app builder that generates and runs web apps in isolated containers on your own servers, from a natural-language description.
🔗 Visit Sandboxd
Description
A growing category of tools now let you describe an app in plain English and have an AI write and run it for you. Most of them run entirely on the vendor's cloud, which means your code, your data, and your API keys all live on someone else's servers. Sandboxd takes the same idea — describe an app, get a working one — but runs the whole thing, including the AI agent's sandbox, on infrastructure you control.
Sandboxd is an open-source AI application builder: you describe what you want in natural language, an AI agent scaffolds and iterates on the app inside an isolated container, and you get a live preview URL to test it as it's built. It includes in-browser code editing for manual tweaks, Git integration to keep history, and task checkpointing with undo so an AI-generated change that goes wrong can be rolled back. It's MIT-licensed and free to self-host; there's also a managed cloud option ($4.99/mo for a hosted app with a public URL, $79/mo for a fuller managed tier) for teams that don't want to run the infrastructure themselves.
💬 Our review
The short version: Sandboxd is a genuinely different pitch from Bolt/Lovable/v0 — same 'describe an app, get an app' experience, but the sandbox and your API keys stay on hardware you control, which matters if your org has a policy against sending code to third-party AI app builders.
The self-hosted-first design is the real value here: MIT license, no vendor lock-in, and the option to bring your own LLM API keys rather than paying a markup on tokens. The trade-off is that you're now responsible for running containers, updates, and security patches yourself if you go the free route — the $4.99–79/mo managed tiers exist precisely to remove that burden, at which point it's competing directly with cloud-first tools that have more polish and bigger galleries of examples. Undo/checkpointing is a smart addition for AI-generated code, since these agents can and do break things mid-build. Worth it if data control or dev-team policy rules out cloud AI builders; skip it if you just want the fastest path to a hosted prototype without touching infrastructure.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Gratuit/MIT en auto-hébergé, 4,99$/mois (cloud + URL publique), 79$/mois (managé)
Pros
Auto-hébergeable, MIT, aucun vendor lock-in
Sandboxes isolés + URL de preview live
Checkpointing/undo sur les changements générés par IA
Option cloud légère à 4,99$/mois si pas envie de s'auto-héberger
Cons
Auto-hébergement = responsabilité infra/sécurité à votre charge
Moins de polish et de galerie d'exemples que les outils cloud-first
Communauté plus petite que Bolt/Lovable/v0