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AI AGENTS · PRICING COMPARE

Agent sandbox pricing compare prices verified 2026-08-27

Capture-dated sandbox rate cards, ranked on your actual workload.

Workload presets

data.csv data.json
At 500 sandbox-hours × 2 vCPU × 4 GiB each, Northflank rents sandboxes for $33.33/mo while Runloop lists $158.40 — 4.8× for identical compute. One self-hosted Firecracker (Hetzner) host bills $153.59/mo idle-or-not — it only wins above sustained high utilization.

Every figure above comes from the same ranked rows below — same inputs, same math, no hand-typed numbers.

Interactive Cost Breakdown

Compute vs memory share of each computed bill at your current inputs — for the vendors matching your search and filter below. Bar lengths scale to the most expensive visible vendor.

Northflank $33.33
Daytona $82.80
E2B $82.80
Cloudflare Containers $90.00
Beam (sandbox) $113.58
Modal (Sandboxes) $119.00
Self-host Firecracker (Hetzner) $153.59
Runloop $158.40
#1

Northflank

$33.33/mo $0.0667 / sandbox-hr 🏆 cheapest
vCPU
$0.02/hr
RAM
$0.0083/GiB-hr
Billing
per-second
#2

Daytona

$82.80/mo $0.1656 / sandbox-hr 2.5× cheapest
vCPU
$0.05/hr
RAM
$0.02/GiB-hr
Billing
per-second
Credit
$200.00 free
#3

E2B

$82.80/mo $0.1656 / sandbox-hr 2.5× cheapest
vCPU
$0.05/hr
RAM
$0.02/GiB-hr
Billing
per-second
Credit
$100.00 free
#4

Cloudflare Containers

$90.00/mo $0.1800 / sandbox-hr 2.7× cheapest
vCPU
$0.07/hr
RAM
$0.009/GiB-hr
Billing
per 0.01s
#5

Beam (sandbox)

$113.58/mo $0.2272 / sandbox-hr 3.4× cheapest
vCPU
$0.07/hr
RAM
$0.02/GiB-hr
Billing
per 0.001s
Credit
$30.00 free
#6

Modal (Sandboxes)

$119.00/mo $0.2380 / sandbox-hr 3.6× cheapest
vCPU
$0.07/hr
RAM
$0.02/GiB-hr
Billing
per-second
Credit
$30.00 free
#8

Runloop

$158.40/mo $0.3168 / sandbox-hr 4.8× cheapest
vCPU
$0.11/hr
RAM
$0.03/GiB-hr
Billing
per-second
Credit
$50.00 free

Why not just a VPS?

A VPS is one long-lived box you administer. An agent sandbox is disposable compute spawned per task by an agent loop — potentially hundreds of times a day, living seconds to hours, then destroyed. Four capabilities you're buying over a raw box:

  • Snapshot cold starts. Pause the entire filesystem + process state mid-task and resume later where the agent left off, in about a second. A VPS boots from disk image; it can't freeze a running session and unfreeze it on another machine.
  • Per-second billing, zero commitment. No monthly plan — idle costs nothing because nothing exists when no task is running. A VPS bills whether your agent used it today or not.
  • Isolation for untrusted code. You're running AI-generated code nobody has reviewed. A microVM blast radius matters at 500 spawns a day in a way one SSH box never confronts.
  • Spawn/exec SDKs instead of SSH. Built for a program calling create → run → destroy programmatically, with structured output — not for a human sysadmin.

You can roll your own: the DIY row above prices Firecracker microVMs on a plain VPS (Hetzner CPX62), which wins at high sustained volume — but then you own image builds, orchestration, and isolation security. Sandboxes sell that ops burden away. Compare long-lived boxes on our VPS provider compare; compare disposable ones here.

Who should skip what

  • Northflank — Skip if you need agent-native session semantics (snapshot/pause-resume) — Northflank is general container platform pricing applied to long-running services and jobs, not a purpose-built agent sandbox SDK.
  • Daytona — Skip if you want the most battle-tested SDK ecosystem — E2B has the larger community around code-interpreter sandboxes at identical rates.
  • E2B — Skip if your agents need long-lived environments — Hobby sessions die at 1h and Pro at 24h; this is for short-lived code-running sandboxes.
  • Cloudflare Containers — Skip if you want vendor-managed snapshot/resume semantics — Containers scale to zero but have no cross-machine session pause/resume story like E2B/Daytona snapshots.
  • Beam (sandbox) — Skip if you want the biggest platform — young product; fine for browser/computer-use sandboxes, thinner on compliance and regions than E2B or Modal.
  • Modal (Sandboxes) — Skip if pure sandbox price is the decision — you pay ~40% over E2B/Daytona for the same vCPU-hour; Modal earns it back only when the rest of your stack already lives on Modal functions.
  • Self-host Firecracker (Hetzner) — Skip if usage is bursty or spiky — the host bills 24/7 whether sandboxes run or not; below roughly half utilization the managed providers win on total cost and you still own the pager.
  • Runloop — Skip unless you specifically want its Devbox/Blueprint workflow — the highest per-hour rates captured here, with add-on fees on top.

Price-change register updated 2026-08-27

8 register entries
0 with deltas vs previous capture
2026-08-24 baseline capture date
register.csv endpoint
Vendor$/vCPU-hr$/GiB-hrPreviousΔ vCPU-hrCaptured
Northflank $0.0167$0.0083—first capture2026-08-27
Daytona $0.0504$0.0162—first capture2026-08-24
E2B $0.0504$0.0162—first capture2026-08-24
Beam (sandbox) $0.0675$0.0230—first capture2026-08-24
Modal (Sandboxes) $0.0710$0.0240—first capture2026-08-24
Cloudflare Containers $0.0720$0.0090—first capture2026-08-24
Runloop $0.1080$0.0252—first capture2026-08-27
Self-host Firecracker (Hetzner) self-host · host $153.59/mo———first capture2026-08-24

Every row carries its own capture date from vendor pricing pages; Δ compares the current capture to the previous distinct one (“capture refined” means our recording improved, not that prices changed). Uncaptured rates render as “—”, never zero; all rates are USD list pricing, never converted. Machine-readable copy: register.csv.

Commitments & regional reality

Computed at the default profile (500 sandbox-hours × 2 vCPU × 4 GiB) from vendors' own published constants — reservation-block terms, regional multipliers, and the honest absence of commitments elsewhere.

Vendor / scenarioOn-demand /moScenario /moΔ vs on-demandReality check
Fly Machines (performance-2x/4GiB)$43.05$25.83-40.0% 12-mo reserved block, −40%Published preset bundle (2 vCPU / 4 GiB) — matches the default compare profile. Block credits do NOT roll over: an under-used month is still billed.
Fly Machines (shared-cpu-4x/8GiB)$29.70$17.82-40.0% 12-mo reserved block, −40%Published preset bundle (4 vCPU / 8 GiB). Block credits do NOT roll over: an under-used month is still billed.
Modal (Sandboxes)$119.00$208.25+75.0% worst-case region ×1.75Regional multipliers run 1.5–1.75× on the base card (excluded from the main ranking — surfaced here instead). Non-preemptible containers add another 3× on top of whatever region you land in.
E2B$82.80—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.
Daytona$82.80—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.
Beam (sandbox)$113.58—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.
Runloop$158.40—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.
Self-host Firecracker (Hetzner)$153.59—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.
Morph——— No verifiable public rate card captured this pass — nothing to model commitments against.
Cloudflare Containers$90.00—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.
Northflank$33.33—— No public commitment/reserved pricing published as of the capture date — on-demand list is the entire price book. Any discount here would be invented.

Sandbox buying guides

Run LLM-Generated Code Safely — Priced to the Cent The classic agent loop: your model writes code, an isolated sandbox runs it, returns stdout, and dies. Short sessions and per-second billing…Hundreds of Parallel Sandboxes Without the Bill Exploding Parallel agents multiply everything: 50 workers × 100 hr/mo each = 5,000 sandbox-hours. This guide ranks vendors at fleet scale — where the …Environments That Live for Days, Not Seconds Persistent dev environments and stateful agents need sandboxes that survive hours or days at bigger profiles (here: 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, 2,000 hr…Your Hardware, Your Jurisdiction — Firecracker on a Fixed Bill When workloads must stay under EU jurisdiction or off shared multi-tenant infrastructure, the managed per-second platforms mostly drop out. …

Head-to-head

All C(10,2) = 45 pairings have their own page — browse them all on the comparisons hub, or start with these analyst-curated duels:

Frequently asked questions

How much does E2B cost per month?
E2B bills per second at $0.0504 per vCPU-hour plus $0.0162 per GiB-hour of RAM. At 500 sandbox-hours/month on the default 2 vCPU / 4 GiB profile that is about $82.80/month of usage, after a $100 one-time free credit.
Is it cheaper to self-host code sandboxes with Firecracker?
Only at sustained high utilization. A dedicated Hetzner CPX62 able to run about eight 2-vCPU/4-GiB sandboxes bills $153.59/month around the clock whether sandboxes run or not — below roughly half utilization, per-second-billed managed providers are cheaper and you avoid running the host yourself.
Why is Modal more expensive for sandboxes than its advertised CPU pricing?
Modal publishes two rate cards: general-purpose CPU functions (about $0.0236/vCPU-hr) and its separate Sandboxes product (about $0.142/core-hr, i.e. $0.071/vCPU-hr plus $0.024/GiB-hr memory). Agent-sandbox workloads bill on the higher Sandbox card.
Which vendor is cheapest for AI agent sandboxes?
Among metered pay-as-you-go vendors, Northflank holds the computed price floor at every workload profile ($33.33/mo at the 500 hr × 2 vCPU / 4 GiB reference — 2.5× under the E2B/Daytona tie). At sustained volume (about 925 sandbox-hours/month at the reference profile, or ~1,150 hr at 4 vCPU/8 GiB) the fixed-cost self-host Firecracker baseline becomes the outright cheapest. Rank any workload yourself with the calculator above.

Methodology

  • All rates are published list prices fetched from official pricing pages on 2026-08-27; every row links its source.
  • Model: compute = sandbox-hours × vCPUs × $/vCPU-hr; RAM bills separately at every captured vendor (hours × GiB × $/GiB-hr). Per-second and per-millisecond billing is normalized to hourly rates.
  • Self-host baseline: a Hetzner CPX62 (16 vCPU / 32 GiB, incl. one IPv4) divided across its concurrent capacity at the reference profile (8 × [2 vCPU / 4 GiB]); other profiles fit min(vCPU-bound, RAM-bound) sandboxes per host — capacity is limited by the tightest resource, not the vCPU×RAM product. It deliberately EXCLUDES ops labor, image pipelines, backups, and idle time — the costs that usually kill the self-host business case.
  • Excluded line items are stated per vendor: storage beyond free tiers, snapshot/object-storage fees, Axon coordination fees (Runloop), regional multipliers and non-preemptible surcharges (Modal), Windows images and GPU tiers (Daytona).
  • Morph renders unranked because its pricing page ships no machine-readable rates and we don't quote numbers we couldn't re-verify this pass.