CodeSandbox vs Northflank: Northflank is 55% cheaper per agent run

Which is better, CodeSandbox or Northflank?

It depends on who uses the machines and how busy they are. For agents that wait on a model, Runtime has the lowest bill: $0.64 for the typical run against $1.11 on Northflank and $2.48 on CodeSandbox, with pause and forks that keep memory. Pick CodeSandbox for browser dev environments or a fixed machine up to 64 cores and 128 GB. Pick Northflank for long jobs with every CPU busy, where it costs less than Runtime, GPUs billed by the second, or your own cloud account.

At a glance

The CodeSandbox column comes from Together's CodeSandbox SDK documentation; Together owns CodeSandbox.

	CodeSandbox SDK	Northflank	Runtime
Isolation	Firecracker microVM	microVMs for CPU workloads, gVisor for GPU workloads	Firecracker microVM, own kernel, every sandbox
How size is billed	Fixed sizes in credits, $0.01486 a credit	$0.01667 per vCPU-hour and $0.00833 per GB-hour	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
2 vCPU, 4 GB, an hour	$0.1486 (Nano, 10 credits)	$0.0667	$0.03125 waiting, $0.08 fully busy
Sizes	Pico (2 cores, 1 GB) to XLarge (64 cores, 128 GB)	Predefined compute plans, or custom plans on request	Up to 16 vCPUs and 64 GiB paid, chosen apart
Billing step	By the minute, rounded up	By the second, while the service runs	By the second, no one-minute minimum
At once	10 VMs on Build, 250 on Scale	50,000+ sandboxes, as Northflank states	100 on a paid account; four without credit
Plan fee	Build free; Scale $170 a month	None published for compute	None; prepaid credit from $10
Free start	The free Build plan	2 services, 2 jobs and 1 database free	100 free hours of a 1 GB machine in the first 30 days, no card

Fixed sizes or per-resource rates: which costs less?

CodeSandbox sells a VM by its size. The size with 2 cores and 4 GB is Nano, for 10 credits an hour, $0.1486. Each VM's running time is rounded up to the next minute, so short tasks pay for a whole minute each. Northflank prices each vCPU and each GB separately, which comes to $0.0667 an hour for the same shape, under half of Nano.

The rounding matters most for short agent tasks. For 1,000 runs of 40 seconds each, CodeSandbox still bills 1,000 minutes, $2.48, while Northflank's rates give $0.74 for the 40 seconds and Runtime $0.47 with the same 20 CPU-seconds of work, since Runtime bills by the second and only the CPU used.

Cost for the same job

Now the full-minute case: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, which is a Nano VM on CodeSandbox and 4 GB on Northflank, with 20 CPU-seconds of work in each.

CodeSandbox$2.48

Size: 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × $0.1486; $2.48

Northflank$1.11

CPU: 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.01667; $0.556
Memory: 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.00833; $0.555

Runtime$0.64

CPU: 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025; $0.14
Memory: 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075; $0.50

Monthly, 100,000 runs cost $247.67 on CodeSandbox, $111.10 on Northflank and $63.89 on Runtime. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it is $1.11 on Northflank, $1.33 on Runtime and $2.48 on CodeSandbox; when every CPU works the whole time, an allocated rate as low as Northflank's is hard to beat. Plan fees, storage, network, taxes and free allowances are left out.

Which one to pick

Main need	Choose
Browser dev environments that people use too	CodeSandbox
A very large fixed machine, up to 64 cores and 128 GB	CodeSandbox
Long jobs with every CPU busy, or L4, A100 and H100 GPUs billed by the second	Northflank
Sandboxes in your own cloud account next to your services	Northflank
Agents that wait on a model	Runtime

For waiting agents Runtime is 74% below CodeSandbox and 42% below Northflank on the typical run, with a microVM per sandbox, pause and forks that keep memory, and no plan fee to unlock concurrency.

Moving to Runtime

Neither SDK has a compatibility import, but each call has a direct match (map the calls). Instead of picking from a list of sizes, you give each sandbox its own vCPUs, memory and disk:

TypeScriptimport { Runtime } from "withruntime";const runtime = new Runtime();const sbx = await runtime.sandboxes.create({ vcpu: 2, memoryMiB: 4096, timeoutSeconds: 900 });await sbx.files.write("/workspace/invoice.py", "print(sum([125, 250, 375]))\n");console.log((await sbx.exec(["python3", "/workspace/invoice.py"])).stdout);await sbx.stop();

Pythonfrom withruntime import Runtimeruntime = Runtime()sbx = runtime.sandboxes.create(vcpu=2, memory_mib=4096, timeout_seconds=900)sbx.files.write("/workspace/invoice.py", "print(sum([125, 250, 375]))\n")print(sbx.exec(["python3", "/workspace/invoice.py"]).stdout)sbx.stop()

npx withruntime compare --from codesandbox or --from northflank reprices what you already ran, and the cost calculator prices any other shape. A coding agent can run the port from the one instruction in migration, on a branch, without credit. Longer comparisons: Runtime vs CodeSandbox, Runtime vs Northflank.

Runtime Cloud

Runtime costs 74% less than CodeSandbox and 42% less than Northflank for a job that mostly waits. 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox come to $2.48 on CodeSandbox, $1.11 on Northflank and $0.64 on Runtime. The difference is what gets billed: a fixed VM size on CodeSandbox, allocated resources on Northflank, and on Runtime only the CPU the code uses, counted per second. Rates checked 25 October 2026.

Run npx withruntime login for an account with free monthly usage. When you move a project over, the migration guide lists each step.

Sources

Rates checked 25 October 2026. Together's CodeSandbox SDK documentation, Northflank's pricing page and its sandbox page reread 26 October 2026.

Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.

CodeSandbox vs Northflank Northflank is 55% cheaper per agent run