sandboxd

The open-source AI app builder — on your own server

Open Source

Developer Tools

Artificial Intelligence

GitHub

Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm the maker of sandboxd, an open-source, self-hosted AI app builder. You've probably seen the apps where you type "build me a dashboard" and a working site shows up at a URL — Lovable, Bolt, v0. They really do feel like magic. The problem is that your code, your keys, and your data all sit on someone else's servers. You can't run them behind your own firewall, use your own model budget, or actually keep what you built. That was the itch I couldn't scratch. So I built the open-source engine that makes the same magic work on your own machine. One curl | bash gets you the whole thing: you describe an app, an AI agent builds it inside an isolated sandbox on your server, and you get a live preview URL. Your infra, your code, your keys. MIT-licensed. What surprised me along the way is that the hard part wasn't the AI — it was the platform around it. Each app has to be isolated so one can't touch another. Each one needs a live URL routed to it. Idle apps need to sleep so a single cheap box can hold many of them. And API keys have to stay out of the sandbox entirely. Once that layer existed, a nice side effect fell out: you can run existing open-source apps in it too — n8n, Ghost, Grafana, and more than 80 others, each with one click. So the project grew from "AI app builder" into a place where AI agents and real apps live together on your server. I kept the internals deliberately boring: one Go binary driving Docker, Traefik for URLs, and SQLite for state. No Kubernetes, no queue, no separate database. It runs on a $5 VPS. A few honest notes. It's still beta (0.x). Isolation today means hardened containers, with optional gVisor for a stronger boundary — not full VMs yet. One thing to know on the security side: sandbox egress is open by default, so apps can reach the internet out of the box — if you're running on a public server, I'd recommend hardening the setup and putting the dashboard behind an auth password. And thanks to OpenCode's free tier, you can build your first app without any API key at all. It's free and MIT-licensed, and I'd genuinely appreciate feedback — especially on the isolation model and on where the first-run experience still has friction. If you self-host it, tell me what you built (or broke) 🙏 One question for you: should I push harder on the "prompt → app" builder side, or on the "run any open-source app in one click" side? Curious where your head's at.