E2B vs Freestyle: pricing, plans and VM features

E2B and Freestyle both bill the CPU and memory a sandbox holds while it runs. The same 2 vCPU, 4 GiB job: $2.76 on E2B, $2.25 on Freestyle.

Runtime runs it for 77% less than E2B and 72% less than Freestyle. A thousand one-minute runs at 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, each doing 20 CPU-seconds of work, come to $2.76 on E2B, $2.25 on Freestyle and $0.64 on Runtime, because Runtime charges measured CPU where both rivals charge for held cores.

At a glance

	E2B	Freestyle	Runtime
Isolation	Firecracker microVM, own kernel	Full Linux virtual machines	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
CPU	$0.0504 per allocated vCPU-hour	$0.04032 per allocated vCPU-hour	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory	$0.0162 per GiB-hour	$0.0129 per GiB-hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
Disk	Included	$0.000086 per GiB-hour, allocated	Included while it runs
Plans	Hobby $0; Pro $150 a month	Free; Hobby $50; Pro $500 a month, counted to usage	None; prepaid credit from $10
At once	Set by plan	10 free, 40 Hobby, 400 Pro	100 on a paid account; 50 for its first week
Pause	Files, memory and processes, no expiry	Hibernate with memory; storage billed while asleep	Files, memory and processes, 1 to 365 days

Where the two differ

Freestyle's rates are about a fifth lower than E2B's on both meters, so it wins this job by 51 cents. Its plans work differently: the fee buys the same amount of usage and raises how many VMs run at once and how big they get, up to 32 vCPUs and 64 GiB on Pro. E2B's Pro plan instead buys longer sessions, 24 hours against Hobby's one. Freestyle adds live forks that clone a VM without pausing it; E2B adds an open-source runtime you can host yourself.

Cost for the same job

The benchmark: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, 20 CPU-seconds each. Freestyle keeps its default 32 GiB disk.

TextE2B       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                                                  $2.76Freestyle CPU    1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.04032           = $1.34          Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0129            = $0.86          Disk   1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 32 × $0.000086         = $0.05          Total                                                  $2.25Runtime   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: $276.00 on E2B, $224.99 on Freestyle before its plan, $63.89 on Runtime. Keep both CPUs busy for the whole minute and it is $2.76 on E2B, $2.25 on Freestyle and $1.33 on Runtime, so the order holds.

Which one to pick

• E2B for its large ecosystem of templates and integrations, and a runtime you can self-host.
• Freestyle for VMs that fork live, or one VM with 32 vCPUs on Pro.
• Runtime when agents wait on models: under under a third of Freestyle's bill and a quarter of E2B's here, no plan to buy for 100 sandboxes at once (50 in the first week), and sandboxes up to 16 vCPUs and 64 GiB. E2B code moves with one import (withruntime/e2b).

More detail: Runtime vs E2B, Runtime vs Freestyle and the Freestyle pricing calculator.

Sources

E2B rates checked 23 September 2026; Freestyle rates checked 25 September 2026.

• E2B pricing, E2B sandbox persistence
• Freestyle pricing, Freestyle VM pricing and limits
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.