Northflank vs Prime Sandboxes: the lowest allocated rates compared

Northflank and Prime have the two lowest allocated CPU rates in the benchmark. The 2 vCPU, 4 GiB job costs $1.11 on Northflank and $1.52 on Prime.

For an agent or rollout that waits on a model, Runtime is 42% cheaper than Northflank and 58% cheaper than Prime. 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox, 20 CPU-seconds of work each: $1.11 on Northflank, $1.52 on Prime Sandboxes, $0.64 on Runtime.

At a glance

	Northflank	Prime Sandboxes	Runtime
Isolation	A microVM per workload, Kata Containers or gVisor	Hardware-virtualized microVM, own guest kernel	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
CPU	$0.01667 per allocated vCPU-hour	$0.02 per vCPU-hour while running	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory	$0.00833 per GB-hour	$0.0125 per GiB-hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
At once	Set by your plan and project	1,024 per account to start	100 paid; 50 until the first week is out
GPUs	L4, A100 and H100 by the hour	Listed as coming soon	No
Terms	None published for compute	Rates published through 22 December 2026	Fixed in each quote

Where Prime loses to Northflank

Their CPU rates are close. Memory is not: Prime's $0.0125 per GiB-hour is half as much again as Northflank's $0.00833 per GB-hour, and memory is most of this job's cost. Runtime's memory rate is below both, and its CPU is billed only while it works.

Cost for the same job

2 vCPU and 4 GiB (4 GB on Northflank), 60 seconds a run, 20 CPU-seconds, 1,000 runs, with Prime's 5 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                                                  $1.11Prime       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                                                  $1.52Runtime     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

Should both CPUs stay busy for the whole minute, the job costs $1.33 on Runtime and $1.52 on Prime, with $1.11 on Northflank the lowest: allocated CPU at a low rate wins when nothing waits.

Which one to pick

• Northflank for CPU-bound jobs, GPUs, or sandboxes in your own cloud.
• Prime Sandboxes for a thousand rollouts at once on Prime Intellect.
• Runtime for rollouts and agents that wait, with forks of a warmed-up environment.

See Runtime vs Northflank and Runtime vs Prime Sandboxes.

Sources

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

• Northflank pricing, Northflank sandboxes
• Prime Sandboxes overview, Prime Sandboxes launch
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.