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Buy phones for your agents or rent them from a cloud?
Agents doing real work need to work where people do: on a real phone, signed in to real accounts, on a carrier network. That's how they work LinkedIn, Reddit and X, browse, shop, book and message.
You can buy and run those phones yourself, or rent them from a cloud. Axilio is a cloud of real Android phones for agents: the same Pixel 8 you'd buy, already online and wired for agents, at a flat price per phone. The phones are the cheap part; running them is not.
Prices checked October 6, 2026 from each vendor's own pages.
What you'd buy
Each price is from the vendor's own page, for the same phone Axilio rents.
1.0Parts
Ten phones, two years
One hub and one host for ten phones, with the hardware spread over 24 months.
2.0Example
Up front: $5,673
Ten refurbished Pixel 8 phones, one hub and one host computer.
Every month: $250
Ten phone plans, before power, space and your time.
Over two years: about $49 a phone a month
Parts and plans only. An Axilio phone is $180 a phone a month with the work below included.
The work after it's set up
This is the part a parts list leaves out, and the part Axilio does for you.
3.0Running it
Keep every phone online
Phones freeze, apps crash and connections drop. Someone has to notice, reboot and recover each one.
Charging around the clock
Batteries age on a charger. Google added a Limit to 80% setting to protect long-term battery health. Plan for worn batteries.
Updates and replacements
Pixel 8 gets seven years of software updates, into 2030. After that, or when a phone fails, it needs replacing.
Plans and network
One line per phone to set up, pay for and keep active, under each carrier's terms for always-on use.
Space and cabling
A place for the phones and hosts, with power, cooling and a network to every one of them.
How the phone is driven
Axilio phones run with no debugging bridge while your agent works. A proprietary control method drives the phone instead, so apps run as built.
The agent layer
Mirroring a phone is free. Reading the screen, finding targets by text or description and waiting for the next screen is software you write.
Seeing what happened
Live view, recordings and a step-by-step trace of every session, so you can tell what an agent did when a step fails.
Which one fits
Buying wins on cost per phone at scale and on control. Renting wins on time and on everything around the phone.
4.0Choosing
Buy your own when
- ✓You run many phones for years and want the lowest cost per phone.
- ✓You need hardware or software a rental doesn't give you, such as other models or a custom OS.
- ✓You have people to run hardware day to day.
- ✓You need iPhones. Axilio runs Android phones only.
Rent from Axilio when
- ✓Your agents need phones this week, not after a hardware project.
- ✓You'd rather spend engineering time on the agent than on hardware.
- ✓You want to add or drop phones by the day, week or month.
- ✓You want the agent layer, live view, recordings and traces included.
Questions
Short answers to what people ask first.
5.0FAQ
In parts and plans, yes: about $49 a phone a month for ten refurbished Pixel 8s over two years. That leaves out power, space, replacements and the time to run them.
A physical Pixel 8 on a carrier network, reserved for you, that keeps its apps and logins between sessions, plus the SDKs, CLI, live view, recordings and traces. Dedicated phones →
$15 a day, $75 a week or $180 a month per dedicated phone, with unlimited hours. Pricing →
Yes. Install apps from Google Play on your phone and sign in once; they stay on it between sessions.