Replacing $100s/Month of Modal Sandboxes With an Idle Mac Mini in My Living Room
andersonbcdefg · x · 2026-10-19
Benjamin Anderson details building a self-hosted sandbox backend for coding agents on an idle Mac Mini to replace hundreds of dollars monthly in Modal costs. Key technical points: Apple's container runtime gives each container its own VM (unlike Docker Desktop's shared VM), improving isolation; he lays out a realistic threat model noting agents are excellent at escaping sandboxes and Linux isolation primitives still see critical bugs, arguing "good enough" isolation suffices for a sole tenant running mid-tier open models — while warning against DIY sandboxes for truly sensitive workloads like training offensive cyber capabilities.
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