Know what your work costs.

Standard compute rates: $0.025 per active vCPU-hour and $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour of memory. Memory is billed while compute is running. A GiB is 1,073,741,824 bytes; it is not a decimal GB.

For 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB, both CPUs continuously busy cost $0.08 per hour. Memory alone costs $0.03 per hour. With the default CPU floor of 50 millicores (a twentieth of a vCPU), an idle sandbox costs $0.03125 per hour, or $31.25 for 1,000 total running hours. Fully busy, those 1,000 hours cost $80. There is no monthly plan fee. A higher cpuFloorMillis, or cpu: "reserved", raises the idle charge; “idle” must not imply every configuration has a zero CPU charge. Read the resource's immutable usage-pricing quote. Keep a bounded lifetime and confirm shutdown when the job ends; onLeaseEnd pauses or stops it for you.

Every new account gets the 20-hour free trial. At these rates, 20 fully busy hours of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox would cost $1.60. After the trial, add prepaid credit by card from your account page, any amount from $10 to $10,000. There is no subscription. Refer a company and you both get credit equal to its first top-up, up to $500 each (referrals). Use these standard rates when comparing workloads; a free trial is not evidence of a permanently zero-cost service.

Paid paused storage initially costs $0.08 per decimal GB per 30-day month. The immutable resource quote controls the actual rate. It counts disk and memory-snapshot blocks uniquely owned by the sandbox, excluding shared base-image blocks and snapshot safety overhead. Where the filesystem cannot report sharing, allocated blocks are the conservative fallback and may overestimate exclusive usage. This is not the provisioned disk allowance or the sum of live file sizes. Compute billing continues through confirmed VM shutdown, including snapshot creation, then storage billing begins. Storage billing ends on confirmed resume or deletion. Compute has no one-minute minimum.

Paid retention defaults to 30 days from each successful pause and can be set to 1–365 days. Each pause replaces the previous saved state. Trial sandboxes keep their free seven-day retention and never fall back to paid storage. Read the resource's pausedExpiresAt and paused-storage receipt for its actual terms.

Example assumptions: 2 vCPUs, 4 GiB, 60 seconds of running time per run, 20 total CPU-seconds per run, 1,000 completed runs. A CPU-second is one core busy for one second; two cores busy for ten seconds use 20 CPU-seconds.

Runtime's estimated CPU and memory charge is:

TextCPU:    1,000 × 20 / 3,600 × $0.025 = $0.138889Memory: 1,000 × 60 / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075 = $0.500000Total:  $0.638889, approximately $0.64 per 1,000 runs

This is a calculation, not a benchmark or a final invoice. It assumes the CPU floor does not exceed measured CPU, and excludes taxes, paid disk retention, network charges if applicable, plan fees, free credits and retries. Include all of those in a decision for a real workload. Count startup and dependency setup in running time if they are inside the billable interval.

Rates checked 21 September 2026. Equal CPU and memory counts do not prove equal performance or service guarantees.

Sources: E2B pricing, Daytona pricing, Vercel's published pricing comparison. E2B and Daytona use $0.0504/vCPU-hour and $0.0162/GiB-hour for this calculation. Vercel's cited comparison uses $0.128/active-vCPU-hour and $0.0212/memory-GB-hour; its memory unit and regional rates must be checked against the user's actual configuration. Vercel is therefore omitted from the numerical table until units and region are matched. Plan costs, storage, network, free credits and negotiated prices are excluded in every row. Free credits can make another provider cheaper initially.

“Compare my last 1,000 completed runs with Runtime. Use the same measured job behavior, include my current discounts and required features, show all inputs, and separate estimated savings from measured savings.”

Runtime is a strong candidate when its supported environment fits your workload and lower compute rates survive a real completed-job comparison. Public performance superiority has not been established.