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

Northflank bills $0.01667 per vCPU-hour and $0.00833 per GB-hour for the resources a sandbox holds, for as long as it runs.

Runtime costs 42% less than Northflank 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 $111.10 on Northflank. The more of its time an agent spends waiting, the more Runtime saves: half-hour sessions that use 180 CPU-seconds each cost 51% less. Rates checked 23 September 2026.

How Northflank bills

Northflank creates each sandbox as a service and bills the vCPUs and memory that service is allocated, for as long as it runs, whether the CPUs work or wait.

Meter	Northflank, as published	For 2 vCPUs and 4 GB	Runtime
CPU	$0.01667 per vCPU-hour	$0.03334 an hour	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of CPU actually used
Memory	$0.00833 per GB-hour	$0.03332 an hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour

So the shape costs $0.06666 an hour on Northflank, busy or idle. On Runtime it costs $0.03125 an hour while it waits, memory plus a CPU floor of a twentieth of a vCPU. Runtime's memory is also cheaper per unit, and a GiB is about 7% larger than a GB.

Example workloads

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

Workload	Runtime	Northflank
Agent runs: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 60 s, 20 CPU-seconds, 100,000 a month	$63.89	$111.10
Waiting agents: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 30 min, 180 CPU-seconds, 10,000	$162.50	$333.30
Tool calls: 1 vCPU, 2 GiB, 2 min, 30 CPU-seconds, 50,000	$35.42	$55.55
Every CPU busy: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 60 s, 120 CPU-seconds, 100,000	$133.33	$111.10

Agents that call a model and wait for the answer are where Runtime wins, by 36% to 51% in the first three rows.

When Northflank costs less

Work that keeps every CPU busy costs less on Northflank: its allocated vCPU rate, $0.01667, is lower than Runtime's measured rate, $0.025. In the last row that is $111.10 against $133.33. At 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB in a one-minute run, the two meet at about 88 CPU-seconds of the 120 the vCPUs can do; below that, Runtime costs less. The calculator above shows where your own workload falls.

To find your own figure, count CPU-seconds: one core busy for one second is one CPU-second, so a 60-second run on 2 vCPUs can use at most 120. An agent that waits on a model for most of the minute uses about 20, well below that line; build steps and test suites run close to the full 120.

What the calculator leaves out

• Plan fees. Northflank publishes none for compute, and Runtime has none: prepaid credit from $10.
• Free start. Northflank includes 2 free services and 1 free database. Runtime gives 50 sandbox hours on the free trial, no card.
• Storage and network. Left out on both sides. A paused Runtime sandbox keeps its files, memory and running processes for $0.08 per GB a month, for 1 to 365 days.

Price your own runs exactly

After a few runs on Runtime, the CLI prices those same sandboxes at Northflank's published rates:

Terminalruntime compare --from northflank

It reads the last 30 days of settled sandboxes (--days up to 90), so it answers the busy-or-waiting question with your own numbers.

On Runtime a sandbox is one call, with no service, project or deployment plan to set up first. The full comparison is Runtime vs Northflank; pause and resume a sandbox shows how waiting work stays cheap between runs, and the sandbox cost calculator prices every provider for your shape.

Sources

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

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