# 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.

## 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:

```
Daytona   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                                                  $2.76

Prime     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                                                  $1.52

Runtime   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
```

A 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](/use-cases/agent-evals-and-swe-bench).

See [Runtime vs Daytona](/docs/daytona-alternative) and
[Runtime vs Prime Sandboxes](/docs/prime-sandboxes-alternative).

## Sources

Daytona rates checked 23 September 2026; Prime rates checked 25 September 2026.

- [Daytona pricing](https://www.daytona.io/pricing), [Daytona sandboxes](https://www.daytona.io/docs/en/sandboxes)
- [Prime Sandboxes overview](https://docs.primeintellect.ai/sandboxes/overview), [Prime Sandboxes launch](https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/sandboxes)
- Runtime [pricing](/docs/pricing)

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.