Objection handling

Common pushback and how to answer it. Each answer cites exe.dev’s docs or pricing page, and competitor facts link to the vendor’s own page, all checked 2026-10-23. If an answer needs a fact the docs don’t settle, it says so.

Price

“A Hetzner or Vultr box is cheaper.” For one always-busy server, yes: Hetzner’s CX23 is listed from €5.99/month excl. VAT and Vultr’s 2 vCPU / 4 GB Regular Performance is $20/month (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized, https://www.vultr.com/pricing/). exe.dev’s case is many boxes that are idle most of the time: they share one pool, and each already has HTTPS, login and sharing (https://exe.dev/docs/pools). Count the setup hours per box, not just the sticker price.

“Why pay $75 a month before we’ve used anything?” The Work base covers the whole team, not per person, and includes 2 vCPU and 4 GiB of capacity. New teams get $37.50/month for the first 3 months (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work). Solo users can start on Personal at $15/month (https://exe.dev/pricing).

“We only need a sandbox for a few minutes at a time.” Standalone VMs are metered by the second at $0.105 per 2 vCPU / 4 GiB unit-hour, with no minimum, and stop metering while stopped (https://exe.dev/docs/standalone-vms).

“What if every box is busy all month?” Then a pool sized for every box costs more than raw VPS hosting. Be honest about that (see the derived table on the competitive page) and lead with the built-in proxy, login, sharing and integrations instead.

Architecture

“We need our own kernel.” exe.dev doesn’t offer that. Fast creation comes from booting a container image on a block device, and “you don’t get to choose which kernel you’re using” (https://exe.dev/docs/faq/how-exedev-works). Enterprise plans add nested VMs (https://exe.dev/pricing).

“Our VMs need to talk to each other privately.” There’s no private network between VMs. The docs point to Tailscale, SSH, or the VM-to-VM integration, which adds an attested caller header (https://exe.dev/docs/faq/cross-vm-networking, https://exe.dev/docs/integrations-vm-to-vm).

“We need a public IP or a raw TCP port.” VMs don’t get their own public IP. HTTPS goes through the proxy, one port can be public, and ports 3000 to 9999 are forwarded to users with access (https://exe.dev/docs/proxy).

“Is the disk durable?” Disks are on local NVMe and “streamed continuously to another server in the region” (https://exe.dev/docs/enterprise). RPO and RTO figures aren’t published. [verify]

Security

“Our agents would have our tokens.” Not with integrations. The credential stays server-side and is injected when the VM calls name.int.exe.xyz, and egress <vm> integrations blocks other outbound traffic (https://exe.dev/docs/integrations, https://exe.dev/docs/internet-access).

“People will share things they shouldn’t.” Sites are private by default. Team admins can set team settings vm-sharing admins-only or off (https://exe.dev/docs/proxy, https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sharing-controls).

“We need SSO.” Work includes SSO. Admins can require Google or an OIDC provider for the whole team (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work, https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sso).

“We can’t run on shared hardware.” Every VM is KVM-isolated. Enterprise adds single-tenant hosts or BYOC in your own cloud account or data center, with a 99.9% monthly SLA (https://exe.dev/docs/enterprise-single-tenant, https://exe.dev/docs/enterprise-byoc, https://exe.dev/docs/enterprise-sla).

Competition and lock-in

“We already have Codespaces.” Codespaces bills per active hour and has a 12-hour maximum lifetime per codespace (https://docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/github-codespaces, https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/setting-your-user-preferences/setting-your-timeout-period-for-github-codespaces). Keep it for quick edits, and put anything that must keep running on exe.dev.

“Fly.io already does fast VMs.” It does, billed per Machine (https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/). exe.dev bills one pool for up to 1,000 VMs and adds login and sharing (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work, https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe).

“What if we want to leave?” “As long as it runs on Linux, exe.dev supports it”, and “rsync will get you pretty far” if you move off (https://exe.dev/docs/lockin).

More head-to-head answers are on the competitive page.