Comment by 6thbit

15 hours ago

Buried in there, note you can opt to self-host your sandbox

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env...

That makes this much more enticing, and potentially eases transition between providers.

Then why tf do i need their api

  • The self-hosted environment is just the backend for shell calls the agent wants to make. The inference bits, thread persistence, and (optionally) mcp/tool calls happen from the API.

  • Some people/companies/whatever might like the convenience and scalability of managed solutions, especially if you're say, just building something simple like a Slack bot with your custom workplace tools/data.

    Yes, the lock-in is real and only good for OpenAI, but there's absolutely demand for managed services where you defer the responsibility of security patching; scaling; uptime, etc to a third party provider. Just like why people use AWS/GCP/etc over bare metal in a colo.

  • Going to be GitHub self hosted runners all over again, you pay for the API and also pay for your own self hosting.

    • This is every enterprise service at this point. Let’s look at my enterprise search provider. We self host so pay for the infrastructure. We provide/pay for the models for embeddings or any LLM stuff. We still pay them consumption based prices.