For me, the essential difference between exe and local harnesses is that they have really nice built in methods to take care of stuff like auth and inter-vm interactions, which makes it easy to build live internet-connected services that I can share with other people. There is no deploy step, which is a surprising amount of time savings. They also have nice things like email receive/send, the ability to issue phone notifications through their app, and just a ton of little things where it feels right.

FWIW, the $20/month subscription also includes $20/month of LLM credits. That’s obviously not sustainable, but it should make it easier to try out the service. I would stick with them even if they dropped it.

Here is an invite link for a 30 day trial (that benefits me too if you were to become a paying member):

https://exe.dev/i/rlDF6GI5PGBZV4P

Or

ssh rlDF6GI5PGBZV4P@exe.dev

Edit to add:

Shelley is a fantastic agent and their batteries included vm image makes the most of it. It includes things like a browser for Shelley to check its own work. And Shelley has root and full access to them, so it can solve any problem and do pretty much anything you need.