Short answer: not on your laptop. Claude Code runs as a process on a machine, and when that machine sleeps, the session stops. "Can it run 24/7" is really a question about where the process lives. There are four honest answers, and we operate a fleet of always-on agents for a living, so this includes the failure modes the tutorials skip.
Why people want this in the first place
Three recurring reasons: a long task that should keep going after you close the lid, an agent that reacts to events (a webhook fires, a cron hits, a monitor sees an error), and the simple wish to send an instruction from your phone at lunch and find the work done at dinner. The first is about task duration; the other two need a machine that is listening around the clock, which is a stronger requirement.
Option 1: your own computer, awake on purpose
The zero-cost version: disable sleep, leave the machine plugged in, and keep the session alive. It works until it does not. Power settings, OS updates, and network changes all end sessions, and a laptop that never sleeps is a poor tradeoff for hardware you carry around.
If your need is just "finish this task while I step away," this is fine. It is not 24/7 operation; it is a long afternoon.
Option 2: a VPS with tmux, the classic DIY pattern
Rent a small Linux server, install Claude Code, and run it inside tmux so the session survives your SSH disconnects. This genuinely works and costs a few dollars a month. Practitioners have converged on it for a reason.
What the tutorials undersell: you now administer a server. Authentication on a headless box, disk filling up, unattended upgrades, and the security posture of a machine that holds your API keys are all your job now. And an unattended agent needs limits, because a looping agent on a paid API is an open tap. If you go this route, set explicit spend caps at the provider level before you leave it alone. We wrote about the wider pattern in self-hosting a coding agent.
Option 3: a cloud session from Anthropic
Claude Code on the web runs the session on Anthropic's infrastructure: your laptop can sleep and the task keeps going, and you can check in from a phone browser. For long-running tasks, this is the simplest real answer, and it needs no server administration at all.
The scope to understand: it is session-oriented. It runs the work you started, in the environment it provisions. It is not a standing service of yours that receives webhooks at your own URL or serves an app to users around the clock.
Option 4: managed always-on agents
The category we build: the agent and the app it maintains both live on hosted infrastructure, with the platform responsible for keeping them up. The agent has a workspace that persists, the app has a URL that serves around the clock, and schedules or webhooks reach the agent whether or not you are online.
The operational reality from running this at fleet scale, which applies to any always-on setup including your own VPS:
- Idle costs are the design constraint. A container that runs at 3am for no one is waste, so real systems sleep idle workloads and wake them on demand. If you build your own, you will reinvent this.
- Unattended turns need caps. Time limits and spend ceilings per task are not optional once nobody is watching the terminal.
- Restarts must respect running work. The difference between infrastructure and a hobby setup is whether a redeploy waits for in-flight jobs or kills them.
Choosing
| You want | Right answer |
|---|---|
| Finish one long task while you are away | Cloud session (option 3) |
| A standing agent you fully control, and you enjoy server admin | VPS + tmux (option 2) |
| An agent plus a live app, no server admin | Managed platform (option 4) |
| To spend nothing and accept interruptions | Your own machine (option 1) |
On VibeKit, every app comes with its own hosted agent; the always-on add-on keeps the app itself serving continuously, and scheduled tasks run whether your laptop is open or not. The free tier is enough to see the model work before any of that matters.