CodeSandbox vs Runloop CodeSandbox is 53% cheaper per agent run

Which is better, CodeSandbox or Runloop?

It depends on whether people or evaluations drive the work. For agents that mostly wait on a model, Runtime has the lowest bill: $0.64 for 1,000 one-minute runs, against $2.48 on CodeSandbox and $5.33 on Runloop, with a microVM per sandbox, free image builds and a pause that keeps running processes. Pick CodeSandbox when people use the environments too, in the browser, or for machines up to 64 cores; pick Runloop for SWE-Bench and custom suites run for you, deployable into your own cloud.

At a glance

CodeSandbox bills a fixed VM size per minute; Runloop bills a devbox's CPU, memory and disk per hour. A 2 CPU, 4 GB job: $2.48 vs $5.33.

CodeSandbox's figures are from Together's documentation of the CodeSandbox SDK; CodeSandbox is a Together company.

What does a 2 CPU, 4 GB machine cost an hour?

The two price the same shape very differently.

• CodeSandbox Nano, 2 cores and 4 GB, is 10 credits an hour at $0.01486 a credit: $0.1486. Each VM's time is rounded up to the next minute.
• Runloop MEDIUM, 2 CPUs, 4 GB and 8 GB of disk, is listed at $0.3195 an hour: $0.216 for CPU, $0.1008 for memory and the rest for disk. Compute is billed only while the devbox is initializing, running, suspending or resuming.

So Runloop costs a little over twice as much as CodeSandbox for a machine that runs the whole hour. Runtime charges $0.08 for that hour with both CPUs busy and $0.03125 while the sandbox waits on a model, since only measured CPU is billed above a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU.

Cost for the same job

Now as a job: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds, a Nano VM on CodeSandbox, a MEDIUM devbox on Runloop and 2 vCPU with 4 GiB on Runtime. In each run the code is busy for 20 CPU-seconds and waits out the rest, as an agent does between model calls.

Scaled to 100,000 runs a month: $247.67 on CodeSandbox, $532.56 on Runloop, $63.89 on Runtime. If both CPUs are busy for the whole minute, the job costs $1.33 on Runtime, $2.48 on CodeSandbox and $5.33 on Runloop, the two rivals unchanged because they bill the machine rather than the work. The totals omit plan fees, blueprint builds, idle storage, network, taxes and free credit.

Which one to pick

• CodeSandbox when people, not only agents, use the environments: it is built for browser-based development, clones quickly from memory snapshots, and offers fixed machines as large as 64 cores and 128 GB.
• Runloop when the product is evaluating models and agents. It evaluates them on your own workload, generates RL rollouts, can be deployed into your own cloud account, and states SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR readiness.
• Runtime when you want a Firecracker microVM per sandbox at 74% below CodeSandbox and 88% below Runloop, image builds at no charge, a pause that keeps memory and running processes, and no plan fee. It runs benchmarks as well; see agent evals and SWE-bench.

Porting templates and blueprints

There is no compatibility import for either SDK, but the calls line up one to one (map the calls). Where each calls it a template or a blueprint, Runtime calls it a custom image: build it once, then start sandboxes from it:

TypeScriptimport { Runtime } from "withruntime";const runtime = new Runtime();await runtime.images.build({ name: "data", recipe: { pip: ["pandas"], apt: ["jq"] } });await using sbx = await runtime.sandboxes.create({ image: "data" });console.log((await sbx.exec("python3 -c 'import pandas; print(pandas.__version__)'")).stdout);

Pythonfrom withruntime import Runtimeruntime = Runtime()image = runtime.images.build(name="data", recipe={"pip": ["pandas"], "apt": ["jq"]})with runtime.sandboxes.create(image=image["id"]) as sbx:    print(sbx.exec("python3 -c 'import pandas; print(pandas.__version__)'").stdout)

An image can also start from a Dockerfile (custom images). To see the saving on your own usage first, npx withruntime compare --from runloop or --from codesandbox reprices what you ran at the old rates, and the migration instruction lets a coding agent do the port on a branch on the free usage. Details: Runtime vs CodeSandbox, Runtime vs Runloop.

Sources

Rates checked 25 October 2026. Together's CodeSandbox SDK documentation, Runloop's pricing page and its devbox sizes reread 26 October 2026.

• Together: CodeSandbox SDK, CodeSandbox SDK pricing
• Runloop pricing, Devbox sizes, Devbox lifecycle
• Runtime pricing and custom images

Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.