Vercel Sandbox vs Prime Sandboxes: pricing and fit

Prime bills held vCPUs cheaply and Vercel bills active CPU dearly. The 2 vCPU, 4 GiB benchmark costs $1.52 on Prime and $2.12 on Vercel.

Runtime costs 70% less than Vercel and 58% less than Prime on it. A thousand one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox, 20 CPU-seconds each, are $2.12 on Vercel Sandbox, $1.52 on Prime Sandboxes and $0.64 on Runtime.

Estimated compute cost

70% less than Vercel Sandbox58% less than Prime Sandboxes

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, Prime Sandboxes overview). Plan fees, network, taxes and free credits are left out. The worked example below shows the arithmetic.

At a glance

	Vercel Sandbox	Prime Sandboxes	Runtime
Isolation	Firecracker microVM, own kernel	Hardware-virtualized microVM, own guest kernel	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
CPU	$0.128 per active CPU-hour, `iad1`	$0.02 per vCPU-hour while running	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor
Memory	$0.0212 per provisioned GB-hour	$0.0125 per GiB-hour	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour
Built for	Code from apps deployed on Vercel	Agentic RL training on Prime Intellect	Agents of any kind, by API, CLI, SDK or MCP
Snapshots	Filesystem snapshots and forks	Listed as coming soon	Memory, processes and files
Price terms	Hobby allowance, then Pro	Published through 22 December 2026	Fixed in each quote; no plan

Two meters, one lesson

Prime's CPU rate is a sixth of Vercel's, but Prime charges it for every second, working or not; Vercel charges only the seconds that work. On a job that waits two thirds of the time, Prime still comes out 60 cents cheaper, and on a busy one it wins by more. Runtime combines Vercel's approach, billing only active CPU, with a rate close to Prime's.

Cost for the same job

2 vCPU, 4 GiB (4 GB on Vercel), 60 seconds, 20 CPU-seconds, 1,000 runs, with Prime's 5 GiB default 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                                                  $2.12Prime     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

At 100,000 runs a month: $212.44 on Vercel, $151.67 on Prime, $63.89 on Runtime. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job is $5.68 on Vercel, $1.52 on Prime and $1.33 on Runtime.

Which one to pick

Vercel Sandbox for code run from a Vercel app, close to its users.
Prime Sandboxes for RL rollouts by the thousand on Prime's platform.
Runtime for the lowest price at any load, memory-keeping pause and forks, and one-import switching from Vercel's SDK.

See Runtime vs Vercel Sandbox and Runtime vs Prime Sandboxes.

Sources

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

Facts on this page were checked on 25 September 2026.