Vercel Sandbox vs Runloop Vercel 60% cheaper if agents wait, Runloop 6% if busy

Which is better, Vercel Sandbox or Runloop?

It depends on how busy your agents are and whether you want evaluation tooling from the vendor. For agents that mostly wait on a model, Runtime bills measured CPU and keeps running processes through a pause. The job below costs $0.64, against $2.12 on Vercel and $5.33 on Runloop. Pick Vercel Sandbox if your app lives on Vercel or needs many regions. Pick Runloop for evaluation and RL rollouts, devboxes in your own cloud account, and SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR readiness.

At a glance

Vercel's figures are at the rates of its default iad1 region. Runloop's are for its MEDIUM devbox: 2 CPUs, 4 GB and 8 GB of disk.

Why does Runloop cost more than twice as much for the same agent?

Because of what each one counts. Runloop bills both of a devbox's CPUs for every second it runs, at $0.108 a CPU-hour, whether the code is computing or waiting for a model to answer. Vercel bills only the CPU time a sandbox uses. Time spent waiting on I/O does not count. In the example below the agent is busy for 20 of its 120 CPU-seconds, so Vercel charges for a sixth of what Runloop charges.

The gap closes as the work gets busier. Runloop's rate per CPU-hour is lower than Vercel's, and its total does not change with load. So Runloop becomes the cheaper of the two only when a run keeps its CPUs busy for more than about 110 of its 120 CPU-seconds. Memory is the other difference: $0.0212 per GB-hour on Vercel against $0.0252 on Runloop, and Runloop adds a small disk charge.

Cost for the same job

1,000 runs of a 2 vCPU sandbox with 4 GiB, or 4 GB on Vercel and Runloop. Each run lasts 60 seconds and keeps the CPU busy for 20 CPU-seconds: an agent that mostly waits for a model.

At 100,000 runs a month, the cost is $212.44 on Vercel, $532.56 on Runloop and $63.89 on Runtime. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it is $1.33 on Runtime, against $5.68 on Vercel and $5.33 on Runloop. Runtime is cheaper however busy the sandbox is. Plan fees, creations, storage while stopped or suspended, network and free allowances are left out.

What survives a stop or a suspend?

On both rivals, files survive and processes do not. A stopped Vercel sandbox keeps its filesystem, and its processes start again. A suspended Runloop devbox keeps its disk, its ID and its SSH keys. Runloop's docs say daemons running at suspend time must be restarted by hand. Runloop stops billing compute while a devbox is suspended, and it keeps billing its storage.

A paused Runtime sandbox keeps its memory and running processes as well as its files. It wakes on the next request, so a dev server or a half-finished agent loop carries on where it was. Forks copy a running sandbox the same way:

TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime";const sbx = await Sandbox.create({ timeoutSeconds: 600 });await sbx.exec("echo state > /workspace/state.txt");await sbx.pause(); // memory and files are kept; compute billing stops// ... later, even from another process:const again = await Sandbox.connect(sbx.id);await again.wake({ timeoutSeconds: 1200 });await again.stop();

See how to pause and resume a sandbox.

Which one to pick

• Pick Vercel Sandbox if your app already lives on Vercel, or you need sandboxes in many regions. Vercel runs them in 19, with up to 10,000 running at the same time on Pro.
• Pick Runloop if you want evaluation tooling (it evaluates models on your own workload and generates RL rollouts), or need devboxes deployed into your own cloud account with SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR readiness.
• Pick Runtime for measured CPU at 80% below Vercel's rate and 77% below Runloop's, pause and forks that keep running processes, and no plan fee. For running benchmarks yourself, see agent evals and SWE-bench.

Switch from either one

From Vercel Sandbox, Runtime's SDK runs your code after one import change, with no Vercel project or token:

TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime/vercel"; // was: from "@vercel/sandbox"

Pythonfrom withruntime.vercel import sandbox  # was: from vercel import sandbox

From Runloop there is no compatible import. Create a Runtime sandbox where you create a devbox, run commands with exec, move files with files.write and files.read, and call stop() where you shut the devbox down. Where you suspend and resume, use pause() and wake(), and the processes come back too.

Or give your coding agent the one instruction in migration. It switches the project on a branch, tests it on the free usage and reports the monthly saving. From Vercel, credit you add within 30 days of signing up is matched, up to $1,000 in total. The full side-by-sides are Runtime vs Vercel Sandbox and Runtime vs Runloop.

Sources

Rates checked 25 October 2026; Runloop's devbox lifecycle page read 25 October 2026.

• Vercel Sandbox pricing, Understanding Vercel Sandboxes
• Runloop pricing, Devbox sizes, Devbox lifecycle
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.