What it requires

Bee Box runs on your own machine, not as a hosted service. A box is your data directory, and the agent is the coding agent that operates it.

A machine that stays on. A Mac or Linux computer at home, or a small VPS. The documentation says a $5/month VPS is enough for the container path. The box runs on a full computer; the design rules out serverless hosting. It does not run on a phone.

A coding-agent login. Claude Code or Codex. For Claude, the documentation requires you to sign in with a Claude subscription yourself; it says an API key alone will not work, by design. The documentation does not describe running Bee Box against a local model.

Accounts, per connector, all optional. A Google account, plus signing in with it and a one-time setup, for Gmail, Calendar, and Drive; the documentation calls that setup the hardest part of installing today. A Telegram bot token for Telegram. A transcription vendor key (Mistral, OpenAI, or Deepgram) for voice. A Cloudflare account for publishing. A git remote if you want the box pushed off the machine. Photos, voice, and typing need none of these.

Docker, or the from-source prerequisites. The container path needs Docker with Compose v2 and a clone of the repository, since no image is published yet. The from-source path needs Node 24, pnpm, and several system binaries (pandoc, ImageMagick, poppler-utils, git-lfs, an Excel reader, fclones).

Running cost: model usage. Each agent turn sends its context to the model provider, so a running box eats into your subscription's usage limits, or runs up a bill if you pay per use. The documentation states this plainly and does not publish any figure for a typical monthly cost.

Setup time. The install guides imply minutes of commands on the container path: initialize the box, log in to Claude, start the container, open the URL, plus a one-time box-local install on first run. Connecting Google is a separate, slower step; the documentation suggests treating Gmail and Calendar as the second week rather than the first hour.

Next: trying it and your data and safety.