What is the best alternative to Vercel Sandbox?
It depends on how hard the CPUs work and what a sandbox must keep. For agents that mostly wait on a model, Runtime bills active CPU as Vercel does, at a lower rate. The job below costs $0.64 against $2.12 on Vercel. A pause keeps the running processes. Stay on Vercel if your app is there and you need its 19 regions. Pick Northflank when both CPUs stay busy, Cloudflare Sandbox for apps on Workers, and Daytona for GPUs or Windows.
Why do teams look beyond Vercel Sandbox?
Vercel Sandbox already bills active CPU rather than every vCPU it holds, so the reasons to move are the rate and what a sandbox keeps:
- The CPU rate. Active CPU is $0.128 an hour in
iad1, against $0.025 on Runtime. The gap grows as work gets busier. With both CPUs busy for a whole minute, 1,000 runs cost $5.68 on Vercel. - Memory is billed in whole minutes. Vercel bills provisioned memory in 1-minute minimum increments, at $0.0212 per GB-hour, and each vCPU comes with 2 GB.
- A stop loses the processes. A stopped Vercel sandbox keeps its filesystem, and a snapshot or fork captures the filesystem, so processes start again. A paused Runtime sandbox wakes with its processes still running.
- Ports are public. Vercel's exposed ports answer at a public URL. A Runtime preview needs a token unless you make it public.
- Company sign-in is extra. Vercel's docs, read on 25 October 2026, make SAML single sign-on a paid add-on for Pro teams and directory sync an Enterprise feature. Every Runtime account gets SAML or OIDC sign-in and SCIM at no charge.
- It needs a Vercel team. Usage beyond the Hobby allowance needs Pro, and a Hobby session lasts 45 minutes. Once the Hobby allowance is used up, sandbox creation is paused until the next cycle.
Which alternatives are cheapest?
Here the job is priced at each provider's list rates: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds on a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox, with 20 CPU-seconds of work in each. Vercel lands seventh, ahead of E2B, Daytona and most others that bill held vCPUs, because the agent is mostly waiting. Each total is worked out on pricing. The totals exclude plan fees, storage, network, credits and custom deals.
| # | Provider | Isolation | CPU billed on | 1,000 runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Runtime Cloud | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Measured CPU, with a small floor | $0.64 |
| 2 | Northflank | microVMs for CPU work, gVisor for GPU work | Allocated vCPUs | $1.11 |
| 3 | Cloudflare Sandbox (2 vCPU, 6 GiB, 12 GB disk) | A container in its own VM | Active CPU | $1.35 |
| 4 | Prime Sandboxes (5 GiB disk) | microVM, own guest kernel | Allocated vCPUs while running | $1.52 |
| 5 | Fly Machines, performance-2x with 4 GB |
Firecracker microVM | The machine's size while started | $1.53 |
| 6 | Morph, 2 MCUs | Full virtual machines | The machine's size in MCUs | $1.67 |
| 7 | Vercel Sandbox, iad1 (4 GB) (the one you are replacing) |
Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Active CPU | $2.12 |
| 8 | Freestyle (32 GiB disk) | Full Linux virtual machines | Allocated vCPUs | $2.25 |
| 9 | Fly Sprites (4 GB in use) | Firecracker microVM | Measured CPU | $2.40 |
| 10 | CodeSandbox SDK, a Nano VM | Firecracker microVM | The VM's size, by the minute rounded up | $2.48 |
| 11 | E2B | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Allocated vCPUs | $2.76 |
| 12 | Daytona | Containers by default; VM class separate | Allocated vCPUs | $2.76 |
| 13 | Blaxel (4 GB) | Lightweight virtual machines | Included with memory, active time | $3.45 |
| 14 | Modal Sandboxes (1 physical core) | gVisor, a user-space kernel | Requested or used, whichever is higher | $3.97 |
| 15 | AWS Lambda MicroVMs, Arm | Firecracker microVM | Baseline vCPUs while running | $4.20 |
| 16 | Runloop, a MEDIUM devbox |
microVM, with a container inside | Allocated CPUs while running | $5.33 |
Cost for the same job
The arithmetic for Runtime, Vercel, and the two other providers that bill active CPU or run a microVM per sandbox:
- CPU
- 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025
- $0.14
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075
- $0.50
- CPU
- 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.128
- $0.71
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0212
- $1.41
- CPU
- 1,000 × 20 s × $0.000020
- $0.40
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s × 6 × $0.0000025
- $0.90
- Disk
- 1,000 × 60 s × 12 × $0.00000007
- $0.05
- CPU
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.0504
- $1.68
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0162
- $1.08
Vercel's CPU rate is what bites as the work gets heavier. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job costs $1.33 on Runtime, $5.68 on Vercel, $3.35 on Cloudflare and $2.76 on E2B. Vercel drops from third of the four to last. A month of 100,000 waiting runs is $63.89 on Runtime and $212.44 on Vercel.
What each alternative changes for a Vercel user
1. Northflank: under Vercel however hard the CPUs work
Its allocation rates, $0.01667 per vCPU-hour and $0.00833 per GB-hour, make this job $1.11 whether the agent idles or computes. Sandboxes are services with deployment plans, and they can be deployed into your AWS, GCP or Azure account.
2. Cloudflare Sandbox: the other edge platform
Cloudflare also meters active CPU, at $0.072 per vCPU-hour, just over half of Vercel's rate. It insists on 3 GiB of memory per vCPU, runs from a Worker on the Workers Paid plan, and offers public-beta filesystem snapshots. Saved files return after a stop. Memory and processes restart.
3. Fly Machines: a bill that ignores CPU load
Where Vercel's charge rises with CPU, a Machine's stays flat. performance-2x
with 4 GB is $0.0916704 an hour in iad, so $1.53 busy against Vercel's $5.68.
Its 17 regions come close to Vercel's 19; the root disk is temporary.
4. Morph: forks that carry memory
A Vercel fork copies the filesystem. Morph's Infinibranch copies a running machine together with its memory, into hundreds of replicas. It charges $0.05 per MCU-hour, and this job takes 2.
5. CodeSandbox SDK: sized VMs, capped concurrency
A Nano VM of 2 cores and 4 GB costs $0.1486 an hour, billed per minute and rounded up. For a Vercel Pro user used to 10,000 sandboxes running at the same time, the free plan's 10 VMs is the gap. Scale, at $170 a month, raises it.
6. E2B: dearer while waiting, cheaper when busy
Allocation billing at $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour gives $2.76 in both cases, above Vercel's waiting figure and below its busy one. Hobby sessions end after an hour, and the Apache-2.0 runtime can be self-hosted.
7. Daytona: GPUs, Windows and EU regions
E2B's rates, a container unless you ask for its VM class, and a wider range of machines: GPU sandboxes, Windows machines, US and EU regions, and $200 of free compute.
8. Blaxel: no CPU meter at all
Active memory costs $0.0000115 per GB-second and brings its cores with it, 4 for 8 GB. Standby follows the last closed connection, and waking takes about 25 ms.
9. Fly Sprites: active CPU, memory in use
Fly.io's agent sandboxes meter CPU much as Vercel does, at $0.0385 per CPU-hour, and memory in use at $0.021875 per GB-hour. A Sprite pauses by itself, keeps its memory at first and keeps its 100 GB disk for good.
10. Modal Sandboxes: one account for GPUs and functions
gVisor in place of a microVM, and CPU charged on the greater of request and use, at $0.1419 per physical core-hour. The draw is GPUs and functions under one SDK.
11. Runloop: devboxes for evaluation and RL
A container inside a microVM, at $0.108 per CPU-hour and $0.0252 per GB-hour plus disk, with tools to evaluate models on your own workload and generate RL rollouts.
Runtime Cloud
Runtime bills active CPU like Vercel Sandbox, at 80% below the price. 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox cost $0.64 on Runtime and $2.12 on Vercel. That is $149 a month saved at 100,000 runs, so Runtime sits first in the table above. Each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, and Vercel Sandbox code keeps working after one import change. Rates checked 25 October 2026.
Runtime also bills CPU by use, at $0.025 per vCPU-hour against Vercel's $0.128, with a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU, and reserved memory at $0.0075 per GiB-hour. After price, the biggest change is what a pause keeps: files, memory and the running processes while you have credit. A fork copies all three. No hosting plan, team or project sits in front of it. The account is prepaid credit from $10.
You can start free, with no team to create, by running npx withruntime login.
The import change below and the migration guide move existing
Vercel Sandbox code.
How to switch from Vercel Sandbox
Runtime's SDK runs code written for Vercel Sandbox's SDK, in JavaScript and
Python: commands, files, ports, snapshots and persistent sandboxes, with no
Vercel project or token. Change the import and set RUNTIME_API_KEY, or run
npx withruntime login once:
TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime/vercel"; // was: from "@vercel/sandbox"Pythonfrom withruntime.vercel import sandbox # was: from vercel import sandboxSandboxes keep Vercel's default size (2 vCPUs, 2048 MiB each) and
persistence, so stop() pauses one and Sandbox.get({ name }) wakes it.
With no timeout a sandbox has no time limit, and a timeout over an hour works
too. Drives or other regions throw NotSupportedError before anything
happens. The full mapping is in the
Vercel comparison.
Ports that must stay private can move to a Runtime preview, which asks for a token by default:
TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime";await using sbx = await Sandbox.create();await sbx.spawn("python3 -m http.server 3000");const preview = await sbx.previews.create(3000);const page = await fetch(preview.url, { headers: { "x-runtime-preview-token": preview.token! },});console.log(page.status);Prefer to delegate? The instruction in migration tells a coding agent to move the project on a branch, check it without credit and report what a month would cost. Credit you add within 30 days of signing up is matched, up to $1,000 in total. Head-to-heads: E2B vs Vercel Sandbox, Daytona vs Vercel Sandbox and Modal vs Vercel Sandbox.
Sources
Cloudflare sandbox lifetime, snapshot behavior checked 25 October 2026. Every rival rate below was checked 25 October 2026, and Vercel's own pricing page again on 26 October 2026.
Runloop pricing Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.
Runtime pricing and the Vercel comparison
Facts on this page were checked on 25 October 2026.