Blaxel pricing calculator: what your sandboxes cost, and on Runtime

Blaxel bills $0.0414 per GB-hour of memory while a sandbox is active, with CPU included in that price: 8 GB comes with 4 cores.

Runtime costs 77% less than Blaxel for an agent that waits on a model. 100,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox, each using 20 CPU-seconds, cost $63.89 a month on Runtime and $276.00 on Blaxel. Runtime prices CPU and memory separately and bills only the CPU your code uses. Rates checked 23 September 2026.

How Blaxel bills

Blaxel has one meter: memory, per second of active time. CPU comes with the memory, so a sandbox's cores are set by its memory size, and how busy they are does not change the bill.

Meter	Blaxel, as published	Converted	Runtime
Memory	$0.0000115 per GB-second, active time	× 3,600 = $0.0414 per GB-hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
CPU	Included; 8 GB gets 4 cores	Nothing separate	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of CPU actually used

At 4 GB, a Blaxel sandbox costs $0.1656 an hour while active. A Runtime sandbox with 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB costs $0.03125 an hour while it waits and $0.08 with both CPUs busy, so it costs less than Blaxel even at full load.

The calculator prices Blaxel on the memory you enter, in decimal GB. The shapes below keep 2 GB per vCPU, the ratio of Blaxel's 8 GB with 4 cores.

Example workloads

A month of each, CPU and memory only, from the calculator above.

Workload	Runtime	Blaxel
Agent runs: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 60 s, 20 CPU-seconds, 100,000 a month	$63.89	$276.00
Every CPU busy: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 60 s, 120 CPU-seconds, 100,000	$133.33	$276.00
Tool calls: 1 vCPU, 2 GiB, 2 min, 30 CPU-seconds, 50,000	$35.42	$138.00
Long sessions: 4 vCPU, 8 GiB, 30 min, 720 CPU-seconds, 10,000	$350.00	$1,656.00

Runtime costs less in every row. Blaxel's price does not move with CPU use, so the busy row is where the two come closest, at 52% less on Runtime.

A CPU-heavy job that needs more cores than memory pays for extra memory on Blaxel to get them. On Runtime you choose vCPUs and memory apart and pay for no more than you choose.

The coupling costs most on CPU-heavy work. Four cores on Blaxel come with 8 GB, $0.3312 an hour while active. A Runtime sandbox with 4 vCPUs and 4 GiB, every CPU busy, costs $0.13 an hour.

What the calculator leaves out

• Idle time before standby. The figures assume each Blaxel sandbox goes to standby the moment its run ends. Blaxel's docs say standby starts about 15 seconds after the last connection closes. Standby itself costs nothing for compute.
• Paused storage. Blaxel's standby snapshots cost $0.20 per GB a month. A paused Runtime sandbox keeps its files, memory and running processes for $0.08 per GB a month.
• Plans and credit. Blaxel has no plan fee; its tiers grow with credit added, and it gives up to $200 of credit to start. Runtime has no plan either: prepaid credit from $10, and 50 free sandbox hours on the trial, no card.

Network and taxes are left out on both sides.

Price your own runs exactly

After a few runs on Runtime, price the same sandboxes at Blaxel's published rate:

Terminalruntime compare --from blaxel

It reads the last 30 days of settled sandboxes (--days up to 90) and prints the monthly saving.

The full comparison is Runtime vs Blaxel, and pricing ranks all twelve rivals on one job. To price every provider at once for your own shape, use the sandbox cost calculator.

Sources

• Blaxel pricing, checked 23 September 2026
• Blaxel sandboxes
• Runtime pricing

Rival rates on this page were checked on 23 September 2026.