Frequently asked questions

Will my command finish sooner?

One command, no. Each Run adds startup and transfer time, so a single command is slower than on a fast laptop: a cold release build of ripgrep took 1.5 times as long under Vanish as on a 16-core M4 Max, and a bare echo took about a second instead of a few milliseconds. Several at once, yes: each Run gets its own worker instead of sharing your laptop's cores, so from three simultaneous builds Vanish finished first, and four finished in 14 seconds instead of 24. Either way the work leaves your laptop: that cold build used 358 times less of your laptop's CPU.

How does the price compare with running my own VM?

A VM you run yourself is cheaper. The default Vanish shape, 8 vCPU and 16 GiB, costs $0.6624 an hour. The same shape on AWS, a c7i.2xlarge, costs $0.4242 an hour on demand in eu-west-2 (London), so Vanish costs about 1.56 times as much per hour.

A free VM is not the real comparison. Google Cloud's free tier is one e2-micro: 1 GB of memory and a shared CPU that bursts. That runs a small service; it will not build a serious project.

What the premium buys is not a better machine. It is not having to run one. There is nothing to provision or keep warm. Your code does not have to reach the machine by rsync or git push, because every Run starts from your working tree as it is, uncommitted changes included, and there is no remote copy of your repository drifting out of date for you to debug. You pay per second, only while a Run's worker is up, with a 60-second minimum, rather than for a box you left running.

If you are happy managing a box and syncing your code to it, that setup is cheaper, and you should use it.

What happens to my files if I stop using Vanish?

You keep them. vanish materialize extracts every byte you have ever made, any day, logged in or not. The snapshot engine runs on your machine without an account or a network connection, so you can check this yourself:

TOKEN=$(vanish snapshot --source . --store /tmp/vanish-store | jq -r .token)
vanish materialize --snapshot "$TOKEN" --store /tmp/vanish-store --destination /tmp/restored

Can I run a macOS-only program?

No. Workers run Linux. Use a Linux build of the program, and install its dependencies with a toolchain.

Do I need to commit my changes?

No. Each Run uses your working tree as it is, uncommitted changes included. Working trees and results lists what is left out.

Does a failed command lose its output files?

No. Whatever a failed command wrote is staged like any other result, so you can inspect and apply partial output. If Vanish itself fails, the Run produces no result and is reported as a Vanish error, with an ID to bring to the Discord.

Can I use it from CI?

Yes. Provide VANISH_TOKEN from your CI secret store; see login. Runs from CI draw on the same credits and concurrent Run limit as your other Runs.