Daytona vs Fly Machines Fly Machines are 45% cheaper per agent run

Which is better, Daytona or Fly Machines?

It depends on whether you want a ready sandbox service or a bare VM to build one on. For agents that spend most of a run waiting, Runtime is ready and cheapest: $0.64 for this job, against $2.76 on Daytona and $1.53 on a Machine, and still lowest with both CPUs busy. Pick Daytona for GPUs, Windows or sandboxes in the EU. Pick Fly Machines for apps across 17 regions beside volumes and Managed Postgres.

At a glance

Fly Machines are at the rates of Fly.io's Ashburn (iad) region.

Is a Fly Machine cheaper than a Daytona sandbox?

At list rates, yes. A performance-2x Machine, 2 performance vCPUs kept as whole cores and 4 GB, costs $0.0916704 an hour. Daytona's 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB cost $0.1008 plus $0.0648, $0.1656 an hour. Both charge that whether the code is busy or waiting, so the Machine stays about half the price at any load.

Fly also sells shared vCPUs. A shared-cpu-2x Machine with 4 GB costs about $0.59 for the 1,000 runs below, but each shared vCPU is guaranteed only 6.25% of a core, with a small burst allowance to start, so a new one would not fit 20 CPU-seconds of work into a minute. The performance class is the fair comparison for agent work.

The price gap buys less than it seems. Daytona gives you an agent sandbox: SDKs, sessions, files, git and a code interpreter, a default idle stop after 15 minutes, and GPU or Windows machines when you need them. A Machine is a VM you drive yourself through the Machines API, with a temporary root disk and volumes for anything that must last.

Container or microVM?

A Daytona sandbox is a container unless you choose its VM class, and only VM sandboxes pause with memory and take memory snapshots. Every Fly Machine is a Firecracker microVM. So is every Runtime sandbox, with its own Linux kernel, and every one can pause with its memory and running processes. See microVM vs container and Firecracker vs Docker.

Cost for the same job

1,000 runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox. Each run lasts 60 seconds and keeps the CPU busy for 20 CPU-seconds: an agent that mostly waits for a model. The Machine is a performance-2x with 4 GB.

At 100,000 runs a month that is $276.00 on Daytona, $152.78 on Machines and $63.89 on Runtime. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it is $1.33 on Runtime against $2.76 on Daytona and $1.53 on Machines, so Runtime is cheaper however busy the sandbox is. If each run lasted 90 seconds instead, it would be $4.14 on Daytona, $2.29 on Machines and $0.89 on Runtime, since Runtime's CPU charge follows the 20 CPU-seconds of work rather than the clock. Disk, volumes, network and free credits are left out.

Which one to pick

• Pick Daytona for an agent sandbox with GPUs or Windows, sandboxes in the EU as well as the US, or $200 of free compute to start.
• Pick Fly Machines for general VMs in 17 regions with volumes and Managed Postgres in the same account, if you are building your own sandbox layer.
• Pick Runtime for a microVM on every sandbox at 58% below a Machine's price and 77% below Daytona's, pause that keeps memory, and an agent that connects without an API key.

Switch from either one

From Daytona, Runtime's SDK runs your code after one import change:

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

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

Sandboxes get Daytona's defaults, 1 vCPU, 1 GiB and a 3 GiB disk, and pause after 15 minutes without calls, with their memory kept.

From Fly Machines, where you start a Machine for each job, create a sandbox instead and let with stop it when the job ends:

Pythonfrom withruntime import Sandboxwith Sandbox.create() as box:    box.files.write("/workspace/invoice.py", "print(sum([125, 250, 375]))\n")    print(box.exec("python3 /workspace/invoice.py", check=True).stdout)

Or give your coding agent the one instruction in migration: it switches the project on a branch, tests it on the free usage and reports the monthly saving. npx withruntime compare --from fly-machines (or --from daytona) prices what you ran at the old provider's rates. The full side-by-sides are Runtime vs Daytona and Runtime vs Fly.io.

Sources

Fly.io prices checked 25 October 2026.

Daytona and Fly.io pricing pages rechecked 25 October 2026; the rest checked 25 October 2026.

• Daytona pricing, Daytona sandboxes
• Fly.io pricing, Machine CPU performance, Fly Volumes, Fly.io regions
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.