Morph vs Freestyle: branching VMs for agents

Morph and Freestyle both sell VMs that fork while running. Morph bills MCUs, Freestyle bills allocation: $1.67 against $2.25 for the 2 vCPU benchmark.

Runtime costs 62% less than Morph and 72% less than Freestyle for an agent that waits. On 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox with 20 CPU-seconds of work each, Morph costs $1.67, Freestyle $2.25 and Runtime $0.64.

At a glance

	Morph	Freestyle	Runtime
Isolation	Full virtual machines	Full Linux virtual machines	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
Price	$0.05 per MCU-hour: 1 vCPU, 4 GB or 16 GB of disk	$0.04032 per vCPU-hour, $0.0129 per GiB-hour	Measured CPU and reserved memory
Forks	Infinibranch, to hundreds of replicas	Live forks without pausing	Up to 10 running copies
Plan	Free with no credit; Developer $40, Team $250 a month	Free, Hobby $50, Pro $500 a month	None; prepaid credit from $10

Forks at different scales

Morph's Infinibranch turns one running machine into hundreds of replicas, made for tree search over agent actions. Freestyle clones a running VM without pausing it. A Runtime fork pauses the source for about a second and gives up to ten running copies, memory and processes included, which covers trying a few approaches from one warmed-up state.

Cost for the same job

2 vCPU and 4 GB (2 MCUs on Morph), 60 seconds, 20 CPU-seconds, 1,000 runs, with Freestyle's 32 GiB disk:

TextMorph      Size   1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 MCU × $0.05          = $1.67Freestyle  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

With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job costs $1.67 on Morph, $2.25 on Freestyle and $1.33 on Runtime.

Which one to pick

• Morph for branching into hundreds of replicas.
• Freestyle for forks that never pause the source.
• Runtime for the lowest bill, with forks when ten copies suffice.

See Runtime vs Morph and Runtime vs Freestyle.

Sources

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

• Morph Cloud pricing, Morph Devboxes
• Freestyle pricing, Freestyle VM pricing and limits
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.