# Morph vs Prime Sandboxes: branching or breadth for RL

Morph branches a running VM into many replicas; Prime runs many fresh microVMs. The 2 vCPU, 4 GB benchmark costs $1.67 on Morph and $1.52 on Prime.

**Runtime costs 62% less than Morph and 58% less than Prime for rollouts that
wait on a model.** 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox with 20
CPU-seconds of work each are $1.67 on Morph, $1.52 on Prime Sandboxes and
$0.64 on Runtime.

## At a glance

|           | Morph                                                 | Prime Sandboxes                                | Runtime                          |
| --------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- |
| Isolation | Full virtual machines                                 | Hardware-virtualized microVM, own guest kernel | Firecracker microVM, own kernel  |
| Price     | $0.05 per MCU-hour: 1 vCPU, 4 GB or 16 GB of disk     | $0.02 per vCPU-hour, $0.0125 per GiB-hour      | Measured CPU and reserved memory |
| Branching | Infinibranch, to hundreds of replicas                 | Listed as coming soon                          | Forks, up to 10 running copies   |
| At once   | Set by plan                                           | 1,024 to start                                 | 100 paid, 50 in the first week   |
| Plan      | Free with no credit; Developer $40, Team $250 a month | None; rates through 22 December 2026           | None; prepaid credit from $10    |

## Two shapes of RL environment

A search-heavy agent that explores many paths from one state wants Morph's
branching: set up once, copy the live machine hundreds of times. A rollout
farm that runs thousands of independent episodes wants Prime's breadth. Runtime
sits between: forks of a warmed-up sandbox, ten at a time, at the lowest price
per run.

## Cost for the same job

2 vCPU and 4 GB (2 MCUs on Morph), 60 seconds, 20 CPU-seconds, 1,000 runs,
with Prime's 5 GiB disk:

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

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
```

With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it costs $1.67 on Morph, $1.52 on Prime and $1.33 on Runtime.

## Which one to pick

- **Morph** for tree search over one live machine.
- **Prime Sandboxes** for wide, independent rollouts.
- **Runtime** for the cheapest run and forks that exist today.

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

## Sources

Morph rates checked 23 September 2026; Prime Sandboxes rates checked 25 September 2026.

- [Morph Cloud pricing](https://cloud.morph.so/web/pricing), [Morph Devboxes](https://cloud.morph.so/web/product/devboxes)
- [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.