Close the laptop. The session keeps running.

It works, and we said so two screens up. The honest difference is who carries the upkeep and who signs the paper. A VPS hands you the box and nothing else: the hardening, the verified backups, the watch over long-running agent sessions, and the accountability are yours, in unbillable hours. And when your client's lawyer asks for a DPA, the VPS has no answer. If your time is genuinely free and no client ever asks, keep the VPS.

For plenty of work, a free sandbox is fine. Two things it does not give you. First, persistence on your terms: free tiers recycle idle environments, and a session that evaporates is the exact problem you came here to solve. Second, an answer for the client who asks where their code runs: for buyers in health, legal, or the public sector, a US-owned provider is an answer their compliance team cannot accept, whatever the price. Wherever your own company sits, what you buy here is residency you can put in writing.

Then Anthropic has cut your access, and your environment has not noticed. We never sell or proxy model access, so there is no Permia account for them to act on. Your session, your files, and your shell keep running; you put a Codex or Mistral key in place of the old one and continue.

On the Dev line, yes, with per-client isolation: dedicated provisioning per account, no shared sandboxes, documented hardening and anti-abuse. The regulated line runs single-tenant on dedicated footing, with no pooling at all. Which one you need depends on what your clients require.

The session persists on the server side via a multiplexer, and the product page explains the mechanism because you should verify it. What you are paying for is everything around that persistence: a box that stays up and patched without your attention, reattachment that works from a phone on hotel Wi-Fi, backups someone has tested, a DPA, and a human who answers. Two limits: mosh runs over UDP, which some corporate firewalls block, so we keep a plain SSH path as fallback; and a phone screen is good for checking on an agent and nudging it along, not for a full day of work.