Runtime vs Morph

Runtime runs each agent sandbox in its own microVM and costs 62% less than Morph for an agent that mostly waits on a model.

The saving: 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox cost $0.64 on Runtime and $1.67 on Morph. At 100,000 runs a month that is $63.89 against $166.67, $103 a month saved.

Where Runtime is better

• You pay for the CPU you use. Morph bills a machine's full size in MCUs for as long as it runs. Runtime measures the CPU your code actually uses, so time spent waiting on a model costs only a small floor, a twentieth of a vCPU.
• Cheaper even when busy. With both CPUs working the whole time, the example job costs $1.33 on Runtime and $1.67 on Morph.
• CPU and memory priced apart. One MCU covers 1 vCPU, 4 GB of memory or 16 GB of disk, and a machine pays for whichever it needs most of. On Runtime you choose vCPUs and memory separately and pay for each.
• No plan fee. Morph's plans with included credit cost $40 or $250 a month. Runtime is prepaid credit from $10, with 50 free sandbox hours to start.
• Your agent sets itself up. It runs npx withruntime sandbox run --trial -- ..., shows you a link, and starts once you approve in the browser. No API key goes into a prompt or a config file, and the MCP server reuses the same connection.
• Guardrails for agents. Give an agent a read-only key or a daily spending limit per key, and cap any create with maxCostMicros. Every write takes an idempotency key, so a lost response never creates a second sandbox.

At a glance

Morph's figures come from its public pricing and product pages, checked 23 September 2026.

	Runtime	Morph
Isolation	Firecracker microVM, own kernel	Full virtual machines
CPU billing	$0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor	$0.05 per MCU-hour for the machine's size
Memory billing	$0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour	Inside the MCU: 4 GB per MCU
Plan fee	None; prepaid credit from $10	Free with no credit; Developer $40 and Team $250 a month
Free start	50 sandbox hours, no card	1,000 MCUs with the $40 Developer plan
Snapshots, forks	Files, memory and running processes	Memory and disk; branches to many replicas

Cost for the same job

Take 1,000 runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox. Each run lasts 60 seconds and keeps the CPU busy for 20 CPU-seconds: an agent that spends most of its time waiting for a model. On Morph, 2 vCPUs and 4 GB is 2 MCUs an hour.

TextRuntime  CPU    1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025      = $0.14         Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075 = $0.50         Total                                        $0.64Morph    Size   1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 MCU × $0.05 = $1.67

• Saving: 62%, or $1.03 per 1,000 runs.
• Per month: at 100,000 runs, $63.89 on Runtime against $166.67 on Morph.
• Busier work: with both CPUs busy for the whole minute, $1.33 on Runtime against $1.67 on Morph.

Plan fees, included credit, storage, network and taxes are left out of both. See pricing for Runtime's terms.

How to switch

Give your coding agent the one instruction in migration. It replaces the Morph calls on a branch, tests them on the free trial, and tells you what you save each month. Your old code stays on the main branch until you merge.

Runtime:

TypeScriptimport { Sandbox } from "withruntime";const box = await Sandbox.create({ funding: "trial" });try {  console.log((await box.exec("python3 -c 'print(6 * 7)'", { check: true })).stdout);} finally {  await box.stop();}

When Morph may fit better

• Branching at scale. Morph's Infinibranch branches a running machine, memory included, to hundreds of parallel replicas.
• Development environments for people. Morph Devboxes are shareable workspaces that scale to zero when idle and keep their memory.

Sources

Checked 23 September 2026.

• Morph Cloud pricing
• Morph Devboxes
• Morph snapshots
• Runtime pricing, security and products