Box is a consumer-ready machine translation research platform for EC2. Usage is simple: instead of using ssh to log into your regular work machine, you just ssh into a Box. What is the difference? Flexibility, and reproducibility. There is no initial setup cost and no monthly fee, so you can sign up to get access now and wait to play around with it later (hourly software and EC2 charges apply for the time you use). You only pay for the computer time you use. There is nothing new to learn, and nothing to maintain. It just works, and works the same way, every time, right from launch. Start training a translation system in the first few minutes of the first day. Run the experiments for a paper. Use Box to build your own babelfish, or multilingual translator. Go play! Many open-source research tools are installed and compiled, all under /opt. No need to maintain software unless you want to. You have full sudo access, so you can do anything you want on a Box. The tools are properly checked out from their source repositories (where available), so you can use Box to pull yesterday's updates, hack away, and then push your changes at the end of the day. Or you can install something else. It's your Box.