Daytona vs CodeSandbox: pricing, isolation and limits

Daytona bills per second on separate CPU and memory meters; CodeSandbox sells fixed microVM sizes by the minute, rounded up.

Runtime is 77% below Daytona and 74% below CodeSandbox on the same job. The job is 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox: $2.76 on Daytona, $2.48 on CodeSandbox, $0.64 on Runtime. Daytona meters allocated CPU and CodeSandbox sells a fixed VM, so both charge for idle cores; Runtime meters the CPU used, per second, and every sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel. Rates checked 23 September 2026.

At a glance

CodeSandbox is part of Together, and its SDK rates here come from Together's documentation.

	Daytona	CodeSandbox SDK	Runtime
Isolation	Containers by default; VM sandboxes as a separate class	Firecracker microVM	Firecracker microVM, own kernel, every sandbox
CPU	$0.0504 per allocated vCPU-hour	By VM size: Nano (2 cores, 4 GB) is $0.1486 an hour	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory	$0.0162 per GiB-hour	Inside the VM size	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
Billing unit	Per second	Per minute, rounded up	Per second
Shapes	vCPUs and memory on separate meters	Fixed sizes, up to 64 cores and 128 GB	vCPUs and memory chosen per sandbox
Plan fee	None published	Build free, 10 VMs at once; Scale $170 a month, 250	None; prepaid credit from $10
Free start	$200 of compute	The free Build plan	50 sandbox hours, no card
Snapshots, forks	Memory snapshots on VM sandboxes	Memory snapshot and restore	Files, memory and running processes; 1 to 10 forks

Which is cheaper, Daytona or CodeSandbox?

For a run of exactly a minute, CodeSandbox: a Nano VM costs $0.1486 an hour, against $0.1656 on Daytona for 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB. The order turns on how long each run lasts. Daytona bills by the second. CodeSandbox rounds each VM's running time up to the next minute, so a 40-second run is billed as 60 seconds.

For 1,000 runs of 40 seconds each, same size:

Provider	Billed time per run	Cost for 1,000 runs
Daytona	40 seconds	$1.84
CodeSandbox	60 seconds	$2.48

Short, frequent runs favour Daytona; runs that fill whole minutes favour CodeSandbox. Neither charges less while the agent waits for a model. Runtime does: measured CPU at $0.025 a vCPU-hour with a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU, and memory at $0.0075 per GiB-hour, billed by the second.

Cost for the same job

Back to whole minutes: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, a Nano VM on CodeSandbox (10 credits an hour, $0.01486 a credit), with 20 CPU-seconds of work in each run.

TextDaytona      CPU    1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.0504 = $1.68             Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0162 = $1.08             Total                                        $2.76CodeSandbox  Size   1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × $0.1486     = $2.48Runtime      CPU    1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025      = $0.14             Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075 = $0.50             Total                                        $0.64

Monthly, at 100,000 runs, Daytona comes to $276.00, CodeSandbox to $247.67 and Runtime to $63.89. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute the job costs $1.33 on Runtime, $2.76 on Daytona and $2.48 on CodeSandbox. Plan fees, disk, network and free credit are not in the sums.

Is every sandbox a VM?

On CodeSandbox, yes: each VM is a Firecracker microVM. On Daytona, not by default: the standard sandbox is a container, and pausing with memory needs its separate VM class. On Runtime, every sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own Linux kernel, and there is no class to pick. MicroVM vs container covers why that boundary matters for model-written code.

Which one to pick

Priority	Choose
Many short runs billed by the second on separate meters	Daytona
GPU sandboxes, Windows machines or $200 of free compute	Daytona
Runs that fill whole minutes on a fixed VM size	CodeSandbox
Very large machines (64 cores, 128 GB) or 250 VMs at once	CodeSandbox
An agent that waits on a model	Runtime

On that last row Runtime costs about a quarter of either, gives a microVM to every sandbox, allows 100 at once with no plan fee, and forks copy memory and running processes.

Moving to Runtime

Daytona code needs only its import changed:

TypeScriptimport { Daytona } from "withruntime/daytona"; // was: from "@daytona/sdk"

Pythonfrom withruntime.daytona import Daytona  # was: from daytona import Daytona

CodeSandbox code is ported with the migration table, where creating, running a command, reading and writing files and shutting down each map to one call. Size is set on each sandbox rather than chosen from VM tiers:

Pythonfrom withruntime import Sandboxwith Sandbox.create(funding="trial") as box:    print(box.exec("python3 -c 'print(6 * 7)'", check=True).stdout)

npx withruntime compare --from codesandbox shows what your CodeSandbox usage would cost here, and npx withruntime switch --from daytona before the first top-up matches it with up to $100 of credit. A coding agent can make the change from the single instruction in migration, on a branch, tested against the free trial. Full pages: Runtime vs Daytona, Runtime vs CodeSandbox.

Sources

Daytona pricing page rechecked 25 September 2026; the rest checked 23 September 2026.

• Daytona pricing, Daytona sandboxes
• Together Code Sandbox, CodeSandbox SDK pricing
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.