# 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.

## 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:

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

Freestyle 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                                                  $2.25

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
```

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](/docs/vercel-sandbox-alternative),
[Runtime vs Freestyle](/docs/freestyle-alternative).

## Sources

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

- [Vercel Sandbox pricing](https://vercel.com/docs/sandbox/pricing), [Understanding Vercel Sandboxes](https://vercel.com/docs/sandbox/concepts)
- [Freestyle pricing](https://www.freestyle.sh/pricing), [Freestyle VM pricing and limits](https://www.freestyle.sh/docs/vms/pricing-and-limits)
- Runtime [pricing](/docs/pricing)

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.