Hosted Agents
The fastest way to a working agent: SideButton runs it for you. A hosted agent lives on SideButton's cloud, comes with Claude Opus/Sonnet included, and needs nothing connected — no cloud account, no credentials, no installer.
This is the same split you know from CI platforms: hosted runners the platform provides vs self-hosted runners on your own infrastructure. If you'd rather run agents on machines you control, see Self-Host in Your Cloud or Self-Host on Your Machine.
What you get
| Machine | Hetzner M · Falkenstein (fsn1), full Linux desktop + live screen |
| LLM | Claude Opus/Sonnet included (or bring your own sign-in) |
| Allowance | Up to your account's hosted-agent limit (trial accounts start with 3) — shown on the Agents page as "· N left" |
| Usage | Flat, metered at $1,500/day per account (fair use) |
| Ready | Usually within the hour |
| Cost | Free — hosted agents don't count against your owned-agent limit |
Create a hosted agent
- Open Portal → Agents and click + Request Hosted Agent (account admins only)
- Pick how many agents (clamped to your remaining allowance) and the LLM provider:
- Claude Opus/Sonnet (included, the recommended default) — runs on SideButton-provided Claude credentials, flat usage up to $1,500/day
- None — bring your own — the agent ships without an LLM app; sign in to Claude Code once on the agent's live desktop (see Connect Claude Subscription)
- Optionally add a comment (repos, stack, what you'll run — it helps us set them up) and click Create agents
The Agents page shows a Setting up strip while the SideButton team prepares your agents. They appear on the fleet page with a HOSTED · SIDEBUTTON chip — live desktop, status, queue — ready to run jobs. You can cancel a request from the same strip any time before it's fulfilled.
The daily usage cap
Accounts with included Claude usage are metered at $1,500/day (account-wide, resets 00:00 UTC). The Agents page shows a usage meter; at the cap, agents pause until the next day — queued work holds, live desktops stay reachable, and everything resumes automatically at the reset. A reached cap is a healthy gate, not an error.
Hosted vs self-hosted
| Hosted agent | Self-hosted agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on | SideButton's cloud | Your cloud account (AWS / Hetzner / GCP) or any Ubuntu 24.04 host |
| Setup | One click — nothing to connect | Connect a cloud + wizard, or run the installer yourself |
| LLM credentials | Claude Opus/Sonnet included (or your own sign-in) | Your own (subscription sign-in, API key, or gateway) |
| Usage metering | $1,500/day fair-use cap | Uncapped — your credentials, your spend |
| Ownership | SideButton's machine, provided to your account | Your machine, your data locality |
| Best for | Getting started, trials, burst capacity | Steady fleets, compliance, custom sizing |
Both kinds mix freely in one fleet — start hosted, add self-hosted agents as you scale.