Runtime is the cheapest for an agent that waits on a model. 100,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox doing 20 CPU-seconds of work each cost $63.89 a month on Runtime, $276.00 on E2B, $276.00 on Daytona and $396.60 on Modal. Runtime bills the CPU your code uses, not the CPUs it holds. Rival rates checked 25 October 2026.
How the price is worked out
Every provider is priced on the same workload, at its published list rates.
| Part | Runtime | Most other providers |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | $0.025 per vCPU-hour of CPU used, floor 0.05 of a vCPU | Every allocated vCPU, for the whole run |
| Memory | $0.0075 per GiB-hour reserved | Per GiB-hour, allocated or in use |
| Plan fee | None | Some charge a monthly plan for longer sessions |
| Minimum top-up | $10 of prepaid credit | Varies |
A CPU-second is one core busy for one second. An agent that sends a prompt and waits for the answer is mostly idle: 20 CPU-seconds out of the 120 that 2 vCPUs could do in 60 seconds. Build steps and test suites come close to the whole 120.
Enter whole numbers; commas for thousands are accepted. CPU-seconds cannot exceed the number of vCPUs multiplied by seconds per run. An empty, malformed or out-of-range field shows what to correct, and prices appear once every field is valid.
Example workloads
A month of each, CPU and memory only.
| Workload | Runtime | E2B | Daytona | Modal | Vercel Sandbox |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent runs: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 60 s, 20 CPU-seconds, 100,000 a month | $63.89 | $276.00 | $276.00 | $396.60 | $212.44 |
| Every CPU busy: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 60 s, 120 CPU-seconds, 100,000 | $133.33 | $276.00 | $276.00 | $396.60 | $568.00 |
| Long sessions: 4 vCPU, 8 GiB, 30 min, 720 CPU-seconds, 10,000 | $350.00 | $1,656.00 | $1,656.00 | $2,379.60 | $1,104.00 |
| Small checks: 1 vCPU, 1 GiB, 10 s, 5 CPU-seconds, 1,000,000 | $55.56 | $185.00 | $185.00 | $263.80 | $236.67 |
Runtime costs less than all four in every row, even with every CPU busy for the whole run.
Why Runtime costs less
- Measured CPU. Time your agent spends waiting on a model costs only the floor, a twentieth of a vCPU. Other providers bill every vCPU for the whole run.
- Lower rates on both meters. $0.025 per vCPU-hour against E2B's and Daytona's $0.0504, and $0.0075 per GiB-hour of memory against their $0.0162, the same at both.
- No plan fee. Prepaid credit from $10, with no subscription, and 100 free hours of a 1 GB machine in the first 30 days to start, no card.
- Pause instead of idling. A paused sandbox keeps its files, memory and running processes for $0.08 per GB a month and uses no CPU or memory time.
Price your own runs exactly
After a few runs on Runtime, the CLI prices the sandboxes you actually ran at another provider's rates, with the date of those rates:
Terminalruntime compare --from e2bIt reads your settled sandboxes from the last 30 days. The same figures come
from GET /v1/usage/compare and the runtime_account MCP tool with action
compare.
Sources
Rival rates checked 25 October 2026, and on 26 October 2026 for AWS Lambda MicroVMs, Freestyle and Prime Sandboxes. Their working and sources are on each comparison page and in the pricing guide. Runtime's rates are in pricing. Plan fees, storage, network, taxes, free credits and negotiated discounts are left out of every figure.