Northflank vs Freestyle: long-running sandboxes, priced

Both bill allocated vCPUs and memory for as long as a sandbox lives. Northflank's rates are lower: $1.11 against $2.25 for the 2 vCPU benchmark.

Runtime costs 42% less than Northflank and 72% less than Freestyle for an agent that waits on a model. The benchmark is 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox with 20 CPU-seconds of work each: $1.11 on Northflank, $2.25 on Freestyle, $0.64 on Runtime.

At a glance

	Northflank	Freestyle	Runtime
Isolation	A microVM per workload, Kata Containers or gVisor	Full Linux virtual machines	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
CPU	$0.01667 per allocated vCPU-hour	$0.04032 per allocated vCPU-hour	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory	$0.00833 per GB-hour	$0.0129 per GiB-hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
Model	A service with a deployment plan	A VM with forks and hibernation	A sandbox, created in one call
Plan	None published for compute	Free, Hobby $50, Pro $500 a month	None; prepaid credit from $10
GPUs	L4, A100 and H100 by the hour	No	No

Platform or VM

Northflank is a whole deployment platform where a sandbox is one more service, with databases, jobs and GPUs beside it and the option to run in your own cloud account. Freestyle is narrower: VMs for agents, with live forks and hibernation that keeps memory. Runtime is narrower still per call, a sandbox in one API call, and cheaper than both while the agent waits.

Cost for the same job

2 vCPU and 4 GiB, 60 seconds a run, 20 CPU-seconds of work, 1,000 runs, with Freestyle's 32 GiB default disk:

TextNorthflank  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                                                  $1.11Freestyle   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

If the work kept both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it would cost $1.33 on Runtime and $2.25 on Freestyle, with $1.11 on Northflank the cheapest of the three. Allocated billing at a low rate wins only when the cores never rest.

Which one to pick

• Northflank for CPU-bound services, GPUs, or sandboxes in your own cloud.
• Freestyle for VMs that fork live and hibernate for weeks.
• Runtime for agents that wait, at the lowest bill, with pause and forks that keep memory.

See Runtime vs Northflank and Runtime vs Freestyle.

Sources

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

• Northflank pricing, Northflank sandboxes
• Freestyle pricing, Freestyle VM pricing and limits
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.