Ascii.dev founders Anicet Nougaret and Kirill Makarov push Box, claiming 5x cheaper agent sandboxes
Ex-ESA data science intern and Volvo Group engineer turn to agent infrastructure; Box targets agent developers with one-command sandboxes, a simple API, and pricing claims 5x below popular offers at equal specs.
By Ryan Merket · Published · Updated
Why it matters
As agents shift from demos to durable workflows, teams need cheap, repeatable compute sandboxes. If Box holds its 5x cost claim, it could lower unit costs for agent ops.
Ascii.dev cofounders Anicet Nougaret and Kirill Makarov are pushing Box, a sandbox service for running AI agents, announced by Nougaret in a thread on X. The project lives at box.ascii.dev and is positioned as a simple, affordable way to spin up isolated compute for code and desktop-style agent work.
https://x.com/AniC_dev/status/2058652162536755401
Pricing is the headline pitch. "cheaper than popular offers by at least a factor 5 at equal specs (4vCPU, 8gb)," Nougaret wrote, saying the team spent months building on Hetzner VPSs to keep costs down. The founders describe Box as the work of two French fresh grads and note they previously shipped two cloud coding agent products with revenue, using the same stack, to prove out the approach.
Nougaret's path is technical and fast. As a data science intern at the European Space Agency, he refactored and consolidated a Milky Way timeseries pipeline and optimized its runtime from about a day down to roughly an hour, then deployed it to process billions of trajectories in a final run. He later co-founded tools work across IDEs and parametric 3D modeling, taught computer science as a private tutor, and shipped humanitarian software in Lomé focused on accessibility.
Makarov brings production engineering and builder energy. Before Ascii.dev, he shipped software at Volvo Group and Ubikap, and worked part-time on data relevance at Yandex. He has been vocal about provider-agnostic infrastructure for AI, and recently won an RTX 5090 GPU at a Mistral AI hackathon in Paris. The company signals backing from Founders Inc.
Box emphasizes low setup overhead: one-command provisioning, a lean API, preinstalled tooling for common tasks, easy attachment of repos, scripts, and secrets, plus hardened defaults (feature post). A mac/linux/WSL CLI is available via the install script at ascii.dev/api/box/install. Updates will post from ascii (@asciidotdev).
Capacity is constrained at launch. Nougaret said supply may run out if adoption spikes, with Box aimed first at personal agent factories and teams running cloud agents for coding or desktop work. He invited teams needing dedicated capacity to reach out for faster setup.