# E2B pricing calculator: what your sandboxes cost, and on Runtime

E2B bills $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour for every vCPU and GiB a sandbox holds, for as long as it runs.

**Runtime runs the same agent for 77% less than E2B.** 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 E2B, a saving of $212.11. Both run each sandbox in a
Firecracker microVM; Runtime bills the CPU your code uses instead of the CPUs it
holds. Rates checked 23 September 2026.

## How E2B bills

E2B charges per second for the size you create, whether the CPUs work or wait.
An agent that sends a prompt and waits 40 seconds for the answer pays for both
vCPUs for all 40 seconds.

| Meter  | E2B, as published     | Per hour              | Runtime                                      |
| ------ | --------------------- | --------------------- | -------------------------------------------- |
| CPU    | $0.0504 per vCPU-hour | $0.1008 for 2 vCPUs   | $0.025 per vCPU-hour of CPU actually used    |
| Memory | $0.0162 per GiB-hour  | $0.0648 for 4 GiB     | $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour                |
| Basis  | Allocated, whole run  | $0.1656 for the shape | Measured CPU, floor of a twentieth of a vCPU |

So a sandbox with 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB costs $0.1656 an hour on E2B, busy or idle.
On Runtime the same sandbox costs $0.03125 an hour while it waits and $0.08 an
hour with both CPUs working.

## Example workloads

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

| Workload                                                             | Runtime |     E2B |
| -------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------: | ------: |
| 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 |
| Long agent sessions: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 30 min, 180 CPU-seconds, 10,000  | $162.50 | $828.00 |
| Code interpreter calls: 1 vCPU, 2 GiB, 2 min, 30 CPU-seconds, 50,000 |  $35.42 | $138.00 |

Runtime costs less in every row, including a sandbox that keeps both CPUs busy
the whole minute: its rates are lower on both meters. The long-session row
saves the most, 80%, because an agent that mostly waits pays E2B for idle
vCPUs for half an hour at a time.

## What the calculator leaves out

- **Plan fees.** E2B's Hobby plan is $0 and caps a session at 1 hour. Sessions
  up to 24 hours need Pro at $150 a month. Runtime has no plan: a sandbox runs
  as long as you keep extending its lease, on prepaid credit from $10.
- **Free credit.** E2B gives $100 of usage credit on Hobby. Runtime gives 50
  sandbox hours on the [free trial](/docs/trial), no card.
- **Storage.** E2B includes disk and keeps a paused sandbox with no expiry. A
  paused Runtime sandbox keeps its files, memory and running processes for $0.08
  per GB a month, for the 1 to 365 days you choose.

Network and taxes are left out on both sides.

## Price your own runs exactly

After a few runs on Runtime, the CLI prices the sandboxes you actually ran at
E2B's published rates and prints the monthly saving:

```bash check
runtime compare --from e2b
```

It reads your settled sandboxes from the last 30 days (`--days` up to 90). If
you are moving from E2B, record it before your first top-up and that top-up is
matched with credit, up to $100 ([switching
credit](/docs/pricing#switching-credit)):

```bash check
runtime switch --from e2b
```

Your E2B code keeps working: `withruntime/e2b` runs code written for E2B's SDK
in JavaScript and Python. The full side-by-side is
[Runtime vs E2B](/docs/e2b-alternative), and [migration](/docs/migrate) is the
one instruction that has a coding agent switch a project on a branch.

Daytona publishes the same two rates, so its [pricing
calculator](/calculators/daytona-pricing-calculator) gives the same figures;
[E2B vs Daytona](/compare/e2b-vs-daytona) covers how they differ, and [E2B
alternatives](/compare/e2b-alternatives) ranks the rest. The [sandbox cost
calculator](/calculators/sandbox-cost-calculator) prices Runtime and all 12
other providers side by side.

## Sources

- [E2B pricing](https://e2b.dev/pricing), checked 23 September 2026
- [E2B sandbox persistence](https://docs.e2b.dev/sandbox/persistence)
- Runtime [pricing](/docs/pricing)

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