Vercel Sandbox vs Freestyle: pricing, state and scale

Vercel Sandbox bills active CPU and Freestyle bills allocated VMs. The waiting-agent benchmark is close: $2.12 on Vercel, $2.25 on Freestyle.

On Runtime the same benchmark costs $0.64, 70% below Vercel and 72% below Freestyle. It is 1,000 runs of a minute on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB with 20 CPU-seconds of work in each. Vercel wins it narrowly among the rivals because it skips idle CPU; Runtime skips idle CPU at a fifth of Vercel's rate.

Estimated compute cost

70% less than Vercel Sandbox72% less than Freestyle

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

Runs1,000

Compute only, at list rates checked 23 September 2026 and 25 September 2026 (Vercel Sandbox pricing, Freestyle pricing). Plan fees, network, taxes and free credits are left out. The worked example below shows the arithmetic.

At a glance

	Vercel Sandbox	Freestyle	Runtime
Isolation	Firecracker microVM, own kernel	Full Linux virtual machines	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
CPU	$0.128 per active CPU-hour, `iad1`	$0.04032 per allocated vCPU-hour	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory	$0.0212 per provisioned GB-hour	$0.0129 per GiB-hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
State	Stop keeps the filesystem; snapshots of the disk	Hibernate with memory; live forks	Pause and forks keep memory and processes
Plan	Hobby allowance free; usage beyond it needs Pro	Free, Hobby $50, Pro $500 a month	None; prepaid credit from $10
At once	Up to 10,000 on Pro	10 free, 40 Hobby, 400 Pro	100 on a paid account, 50 the first week

Memory is where they part

A Vercel sandbox that stops keeps its files, and its processes start again on the next run. Freestyle hibernates a VM with its memory in place and brings it back weeks later, the same promise a Runtime pause makes for up to 365 days. For an agent that holds a long-running dev server or a warm interpreter, keeping memory saves the rebuild on every return.

Cost for the same job

The benchmark, 60 seconds a run, with Freestyle's default 32 GiB disk:

TextVercel    CPU    1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.128                 = $0.71          Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0212            = $1.41          Total                                                  $2.12Freestyle 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

A 100,000-run month: $212.44 on Vercel, $224.99 on Freestyle, $63.89 on Runtime. If the runs kept both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job would cost $5.68 on Vercel, $2.25 on Freestyle and $1.33 on Runtime.

Which one to pick

Vercel Sandbox for Vercel-hosted apps, 19 regions and very high concurrency on Pro.
Freestyle for long-lived VMs with live forks, up to 32 vCPUs on Pro.
Runtime for the lowest bill whether the agent waits or works, memory kept across pauses, and a one-import move from Vercel's SDK (withruntime/vercel).

More: Runtime vs Vercel Sandbox, Runtime vs Freestyle.

Sources

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

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.