Runtime

Morph vs Northflank: pricing, isolation and limits

Morph bills a VM in MCUs for its largest need; Northflank bills each vCPU and GB apart. A 2 vCPU, 4 GB job: $1.67 against $1.11.

Runtime charges 62% less than Morph and 42% less than Northflank when the agent spends its minute waiting. 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox come to $1.67 on Morph, $1.11 on Northflank and $0.64 on Runtime. Morph bills the machine's size and Northflank its allocated resources; Runtime bills the CPU the code spends. Rates checked 23 September 2026.

Estimated compute cost

62% less than Morph42% less than Northflank

2 vCPUs · 4 GiB · 60 s a run · 20 CPU-seconds busy

1,000

Compute only, at list rates checked 23 September 2026 (Morph Cloud pricing, Northflank pricing). Plan fees, network, taxes and free credits are left out. The worked example below shows the arithmetic.

At a glance

Morph Northflank Runtime
Isolation Full virtual machines Kata Containers and gVisor Firecracker microVM, own kernel, every sandbox
CPU Inside the MCU: 1 vCPU per MCU $0.01667 per allocated vCPU-hour $0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory Inside the MCU: 4 GB per MCU $0.00833 per GB-hour $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
2 vCPU, 4 GB, an hour $0.10 (2 MCUs) $0.0667 $0.03125 waiting, $0.08 fully busy
Plan fee Free with no credit; Developer $40 and Team $250 a month None published for compute None; prepaid credit from $10
Free start No free credit; 1,000 MCUs come with Developer ($40) 2 free services and 1 free database 50 sandbox hours, no card
Where it runs Morph Cloud Northflank's regions, or your AWS, GCP or Azure account Dedicated servers Runtime operates

Why does the same machine cost more on Morph?

Northflank's two rates are Morph's MCU split in pieces. One MCU, $0.05 an hour, buys 1 vCPU or 4 GB of memory (or 16 GB of disk), and a machine pays for as many MCUs as its largest need. On Northflank, 1 vCPU costs $0.01667 an hour and 4 GB costs $0.03332, together $0.05.

So the two cost the same only when a machine has exactly 4 GB per vCPU. Any other shape pays Morph for resources it does not use:

Shape Morph Northflank
2 vCPU, 4 GB 2 MCUs, $0.10 $0.0667
2 vCPU, 8 GB 2 MCUs, $0.10 $0.1000
1 vCPU, 8 GB 2 MCUs, $0.10 $0.0833
4 vCPU, 4 GB 4 MCUs, $0.20 $0.1000

The MCU does include disk, 16 GB per MCU, which the Northflank figures leave out. Runtime prices CPU and memory apart too, and it bills the CPU the code actually uses, so the same 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox is $0.03125 an hour while it waits on a model.

Cost for the same job

The job: 1,000 runs, 60 seconds each, 20 CPU-seconds of work apiece, on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB. That is 2 MCUs on Morph and 4 GB on Northflank.

TextMorph       Size   1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 MCU × $0.05  = $1.67Northflank  CPU    1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.01667   = $0.556            Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.00833   = $0.555            Total                                           $1.11Runtime     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

Across a month of 100,000 runs: $166.67 on Morph, $111.10 on Northflank, $63.89 on Runtime. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it is $1.11 on Northflank, $1.33 on Runtime and $1.67 on Morph, so for saturated CPUs Northflank's allocated pricing is the cheapest. Plan fees, included credit, storage, network and taxes are left out.

Which one to pick

  • Morph, for branching: Infinibranch clones a running machine, memory and all, into hundreds of replicas, and its Devboxes are shareable workspaces that scale to zero without losing memory.
  • Northflank, for long CPU-bound jobs, L4, A100 and H100 GPUs by the hour, or sandboxes inside your own AWS, GCP or Azure account next to other services.
  • Runtime, for agents that wait on a model: 62% below Morph and 42% below Northflank on the typical run, a Firecracker microVM per sandbox, forks with memory, and one create call with no service to define.

Moving a workspace

No compatibility import exists for either; the port follows map the calls. A workspace that should last, the job a Morph Devbox or a Northflank service does, becomes a named sandbox. The same call returns it later, waking it if it paused, and it pauses on its own when idle:

TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime";const dev = await Sandbox.getOrCreate("dev", { idlePauseSeconds: 900 });await dev.exec("git pull || true");// The next process, or tomorrow, gets the same sandbox and its files.
Pythonfrom withruntime import Sandboxdev = Sandbox.get_or_create("dev", idle_pause_seconds=900)dev.exec("git pull || true")

npx withruntime compare --from morph or --from northflank reprices your past usage at Runtime's rates. A coding agent can port the project from the single instruction in migration, on a branch, tested on the free trial. See Runtime vs Morph, Runtime vs Northflank and, for workspaces, per-user dev environments.

Sources

Rates checked 23 September 2026. Morph's and Northflank's pricing pages and Northflank's sandbox page reread 25 September 2026.

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.

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