What is the best alternative to Freestyle?
It depends on whether you chose Freestyle for live forks or for persistent VMs. For agents that wait on a model, Runtime has the lowest bill: $0.64 for the job below, against $2.25 on Freestyle, with no plan fee. It also forks a running sandbox with its memory. Pick Prime Sandboxes for 1,024 simultaneous sandboxes, E2B for paused sandboxes kept with no expiry, and Fly Machines for 17 regions.
What sends a Freestyle user looking?
Freestyle sells full Linux VMs for long-running agent work: fast provisioning, hibernation with memory kept, and live forks. The reasons to compare are mostly about the bill:
- Allocation, not use. Freestyle charges for every vCPU, GiB of memory and GiB of disk a VM holds, for as long as it holds them. An agent waiting on a model keeps paying for idle cores.
- Plans gate concurrency. Ten VMs concurrently on the free plan, 40 on Hobby at $50 a month, 400 on Pro at $500. A fleet of agents reaches Pro quickly.
- Plans gate size too. Hobby tops out at 8 vCPUs and 16 GiB per VM, and 64 GiB of memory requires Pro.
- TypeScript first. Freestyle's VM documentation shows TypeScript and its CLI, with no Python examples.
Which alternatives are cheapest?
One workload for all rows: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, each keeping the CPU busy for 20 CPU-seconds. Freestyle is in the middle of the table, eighth of sixteen. The sums behind each row are in pricing, without plan fees, storage beyond a running disk, network or credits.
| # | Provider | Isolation | CPU billed on | 1,000 runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Runtime Cloud | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Measured CPU, with a small floor | $0.64 |
| 2 | Northflank | microVMs for CPU work, gVisor for GPU work | Allocated vCPUs | $1.11 |
| 3 | Cloudflare Sandbox (2 vCPU, 6 GiB, 12 GB disk) | A container in its own VM | Active CPU | $1.35 |
| 4 | Prime Sandboxes (5 GiB disk) | microVM, own guest kernel | Allocated vCPUs while running | $1.52 |
| 5 | Fly Machines, performance-2x with 4 GB |
Firecracker microVM | The machine's size while started | $1.53 |
| 6 | Morph, 2 MCUs | Full virtual machines | The machine's size in MCUs | $1.67 |
| 7 | Vercel Sandbox, iad1 (4 GB) |
Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Active CPU | $2.12 |
| 8 | Freestyle (32 GiB disk), the one you are replacing | Full Linux virtual machines | Allocated vCPUs | $2.25 |
| 9 | Fly Sprites (4 GB in use) | Firecracker microVM | Measured CPU | $2.40 |
| 10 | CodeSandbox SDK, a Nano VM | Firecracker microVM | The VM's size, by the minute rounded up | $2.48 |
| 11 | E2B | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Allocated vCPUs | $2.76 |
| 12 | Daytona | Containers by default; VM class separate | Allocated vCPUs | $2.76 |
| 13 | Blaxel (4 GB) | Lightweight virtual machines | Included with memory, active time | $3.45 |
| 14 | Modal Sandboxes (1 physical core) | gVisor, a user-space kernel | Requested or used, whichever is higher | $3.97 |
| 15 | AWS Lambda MicroVMs, Arm | Firecracker microVM | Baseline vCPUs while running | $4.20 |
| 16 | Runloop, a MEDIUM devbox |
microVM, with a container inside | Allocated CPUs while running | $5.33 |
Cost for the same job
Runtime, Freestyle, Prime Sandboxes (the cheapest other allocated microVM) and E2B (the best-known agent sandbox), side by side:
- CPU
- 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025
- $0.14
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075
- $0.50
- 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
- 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
- CPU
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.0504
- $1.68
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0162
- $1.08
With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job costs $1.33 on Runtime, $2.25 on Freestyle, $1.52 on Prime and $2.76 on E2B. The three allocated providers cost the same whether busy or idle. Runtime's figure rises with use and still stays lowest, because both of its rates are below Freestyle's.
The alternatives, for a Freestyle user
1. Prime Sandboxes: low rates, RL scale
$0.02 per vCPU-hour and $0.0125 per GiB-hour while running, and 1,024 sandboxes running at the same time from the start. The rates are published through 22 December 2026. Checkpoints and forks save the filesystem only.
2. Morph: forks as the product
2 MCUs at $0.05 each cover this shape. Infinibranch branches a running VM, memory included, into many replicas.
3. E2B: hibernation without expiry
Firecracker at $0.0504 per allocated vCPU-hour. A paused sandbox keeps its memory and has no expiry. Long sessions need the $150-a-month Pro plan.
4. Fly Machines: a machine by the second
$0.0916704 an hour for performance-2x with 4 GB in iad, in 17 regions, billed
while started.
Runtime Cloud
Runtime costs 72% less than Freestyle when an agent spends its time waiting on a model. 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox cost $0.64 on Runtime and $2.25 on Freestyle. That is $161 a month saved at 100,000 runs, before Freestyle's $50 or $500 plan. That figure is first in the table above. Freestyle rates were checked 25 October 2026. The other rivals' rates were checked 25 October 2026.
Each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel. It costs $0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU, and $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour. There is no plan. A paid account runs 100 sandboxes at the same time, and a sandbox can have up to 16 vCPUs and 64 GiB. Pause keeps memory and processes while you have credit. Forks copy a running sandbox. There are SDKs for Python and JavaScript, a CLI and an MCP server.
There is no plan to pick before a first run. npx withruntime login starts you
free. The migration guide and the notes below cover moving
Freestyle snapshots and VMs.
Moving from Freestyle
A Freestyle snapshot you start VMs from becomes a Runtime snapshot. A VM you keep for weeks becomes a sandbox that pauses when idle and wakes on the next request:
TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime";const base = await Sandbox.create();await base.exec("git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pallets/flask /workspace/app");const snapshot = await base.snapshot({ name: "app-ready", retentionDays: 30 });await base.stop();await using worker = await Sandbox.create({ snapshot: snapshot.id, idlePauseSeconds: 600 });console.log((await worker.exec("ls /workspace/app")).stdout);The migration guide has your coding agent port the calls on a branch and test them without credit. For the detail, read Runtime vs Freestyle, or price your own shape in the Freestyle pricing calculator.
Sources
Freestyle was checked 26 October 2026, and Prime Sandboxes the same day. E2B, Morph and Fly.io rates were checked 25 October 2026.