Daytona vs Prime Sandboxes: pricing, isolation and RL scale
Prime Sandboxes are microVMs at $0.02 per vCPU-hour; Daytona defaults to containers at $0.0504. The benchmark costs $1.52 on Prime and $2.76 on Daytona.
On Runtime the benchmark costs $0.64: 77% below Daytona and 58% below Prime. It is 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox doing 20 CPU-seconds of work each, the pattern of an agent or a rollout waiting on a model. Runtime bills that waiting at a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU.
Estimated compute cost
77% less than Daytona58% less than Prime Sandboxes
2 vCPUs · 4 GiB · 60 s a run · 20 CPU-seconds busy
Compute only, at list rates checked 23 September 2026 and 25 September 2026 (Daytona pricing, Prime Sandboxes overview). Plan fees, network, taxes and free credits are left out. The worked example below shows the arithmetic.
At a glance
| Daytona | Prime Sandboxes | Runtime | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Containers by default; VM sandboxes as a separate class | Hardware-virtualized microVM, own guest kernel | Firecracker microVM, own kernel, every sandbox |
| CPU | $0.0504 per allocated vCPU-hour | $0.02 per vCPU-hour while running | $0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor |
| Memory | $0.0162 per GiB-hour | $0.0125 per GiB-hour | $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour |
| Pause and fork | On VM sandboxes | Listed as coming soon | Every sandbox; forks keep memory |
| At once | Set by tier | 1,024 per account to start | 100 on a paid account (50 while it is new) |
| GPUs | Offered | Listed as coming soon | Not offered |
| Price terms | None published | Published through 22 December 2026 | Fixed in each quote |
Two routes to RL environments
Both pitch themselves at agent training. Daytona's route is breadth: GPU sandboxes, Windows, snapshots of VM sandboxes and a large free start. Prime's is scale and price: a microVM for every sandbox, a thousand of them at once, and CPU at under half Daytona's rate. What Prime lacks today is state between steps, which it lists as coming soon.
Cost for the same job
The benchmark, 60 seconds a run, priced line by line; Prime's 5 GiB default disk included, Daytona's first 5 GiB free:
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 $2.76Prime CPU 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.02 = $0.67 Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0125 = $0.83 Disk 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 5 × $0.0002 = $0.02 Total $1.52Runtime CPU 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025 = $0.14 Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075 = $0.50 Total $0.64A 100,000-run month is $276.00 on Daytona, $151.67 on Prime and $63.89 on Runtime. If each run kept both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job would be $2.76 on Daytona, $1.52 on Prime and $1.33 on Runtime.
Which one to pick
- Daytona when training needs GPUs or Windows today.
- Prime Sandboxes for rollouts by the thousand on Prime Intellect's own platform.
- Runtime for a microVM per sandbox at the lowest price, pause and forks that keep memory now, and eval harnesses that plug straight in: agent evals and SWE-bench.
See Runtime vs Daytona and Runtime vs Prime Sandboxes.
Sources
Daytona rates checked 23 September 2026; Prime rates checked 25 September 2026.
Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.