Runtime vs Northflank

• You pay for the CPU you use. Northflank bills the vCPUs and memory a sandbox holds for as long as it runs. Runtime measures the CPU your code actually uses. Time spent waiting on a model costs only a small floor, a twentieth of a vCPU.
• It pauses itself when idle. After 300 seconds with no request, command, connection, traffic or CPU use, a Runtime sandbox pauses. While paused, it pays only paused storage, $0.08 per GB (10⁹ bytes) a month. The next request wakes it. Its processes keep running.
• An uptime promise that pays itself. Paid accounts get 99% API uptime each month. A month below that returns 10% of that month's charges as credit. No claim is needed (Uptime Promise).
• Cheaper memory. $0.0075 per GiB-hour on Runtime, against $0.00833 per GB-hour on Northflank. A GiB is about 7% larger than a GB.
• A sandbox is one call. Sandbox.create() returns a running sandbox. No service, project or deployment plan is needed. Northflank creates each sandbox as a service.
• Pause and fork keep memory. A paused Runtime sandbox wakes with its processes still running, kept while you have credit. A fork copies a running sandbox with its memory.
• Teams at no extra charge. Single sign-on over SAML or OIDC (Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace), SCIM, roles and an audit log come with every account (single sign-on). Northflank lists SAML and OIDC sign-in on its Enterprise plan.
• A fixed outbound address on any paid account. Every sandbox in the account sends from one dedicated address you can allow-list. It costs $5 a month (dedicated addresses). Northflank lists egress IPs on its Enterprise plan.
• Keys the sandbox never sees. Store an API key once. The sandbox holds a placeholder. Runtime's proxy adds the value only to HTTPS requests to the hosts you name, so a prompt injection has nothing to leak (security).
• Your agent sets itself up. It runs npx withruntime sandboxes run -- ..., shows you a link, and starts once you approve in the browser. No API key goes into a prompt or a config file. The MCP server reuses the same connection.
• Guardrails for agents. Give an agent a read-only key or a daily spending limit per key. Cap any sandbox's total cost with maxTotalCostMicros. Every write takes an idempotency key, so a lost response never creates a second sandbox.

Also included: a code interpreter, network allow and deny lists, custom images, volumes backed up daily, private previews, a Linux desktop, metrics, webhooks, OpenTelemetry export, S3, R2 and GCS bucket mounts, MCP servers from a catalog, and identity tokens for AWS and Google Cloud. Paid accounts add custom domains, TCP ports and WireGuard private networks. See products.

Northflank's figures come from its public pricing and documentation. Last checked 25 October 2026.

Take 1,000 runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox (4 GB on Northflank). Each run lasts 60 seconds and keeps the CPU busy for 20 CPU-seconds. This is an agent that spends most of its time waiting for a model.

• Saving: 42%, or $0.47 per 1,000 runs.
• Per month: at 100,000 runs, $63.89 on Runtime against $111.10 on Northflank.
• Busier work: with both CPUs busy for the whole minute, $1.33 on Runtime against $1.11 on Northflank.

The more time an agent spends waiting, the more Runtime saves. Storage, network, taxes and free allowances are excluded from both. On Runtime, inbound traffic is free. Each account's first 100 GiB out a month is free. After that, the rate is $0.02 per GB (10⁹ bytes). See pricing for Runtime's terms.

Give your coding agent the one instruction in migration. It replaces the Northflank calls on a branch, tests them on the free usage, 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();try {  await box.files.write("/workspace/invoice.py", "print(sum([125, 250, 375]))\n");  console.log((await box.exec("python3 /workspace/invoice.py", { check: true })).stdout);} finally {  await box.stop();}

• Work that keeps every CPU busy. Northflank's allocated vCPU rate is lower than Runtime's measured rate. A job that uses all its CPUs all the time costs less there: $1.11 against $1.33 in the example.
• GPUs. Northflank rents GPUs billed by the second, including L4, A100 and H100.
• Your own cloud and many regions. Northflank runs in your AWS, GCP or Azure account as well as its own regions. Runtime runs in one US region.

Checked 23 September 2026; isolation, billing and free plan rechecked 26 October 2026; single sign-on and egress IPs checked 27 September 2026.

• Northflank pricing
• Northflank sandboxes
• Sandboxes on Northflank
• Runtime pricing, security and products