Render is taking on Vercel with AI sandboxes that can run indefinitely, along with new tools for managing long-running agent workflows and shared storage.

Announced Wednesday, the launch removes Render’s previous 30-day continuous runtime limit on paid workspace plans. Vercel caps individual sandbox sessions at 24 hours, while Render says its environments can suspend when idle and resume with their files, memory and running processes intact.

Render founder and CEO Anurag Goel, a former Stripe engineer and head of risk, built the platform as an alternative to AWS without the same infrastructure complexity. Now he’s extending that approach to AI agents, combining sandboxes, durable workflows, and shared storage with the applications and databases they depend on.

Not everything is ready yet. Credential brokering will initially be available only to selected customers, private networking for sandboxes is still in development, and Render has yet to settle how its shared storage will handle simultaneous writes to the same file.

With this launch, Render sandboxes can stay active through a multi-day codebase migration or while an agent tests an entire application.

The bigger difference comes when a sandbox needs to resume work. Vercel limits uninterrupted sessions to 24 hours, and while persistent sandboxes can restart, their running processes start over.

Render takes a different approach. A sandbox “suspends when it goes idle and wakes on the next command with its files and memory intact, so the agent picks up mid-task instead of rebuilding its state,” the company tells The New Stack .

Source link