Runtime for Startups

Runtime for Startups gives an accepted venture-backed startup $5,000 of Runtime credit for its agents' sandboxes, about $417 a month for 12 months, and a paid account from the first day. For an agent that spends most of its time waiting on a model, that is as much work as $21,600 buys at E2B's published rates.

$5,000 is over 60,000 hours of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox with both vCPUs busy the whole time, at $0.08 an hour.

Credit goes further here because Runtime bills CPU on what your code uses, not on every vCPU for as long as a sandbox runs. An agent mostly waits on a model, so most of what other providers charge for, Runtime does not.

What $5,000 runs

The same agent job at each provider's published rates: runs of 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, 60 seconds each with 20 CPU-seconds of work, the rest spent waiting on a model.

Rates checked 23 September 2026, 25 September 2026, 27 September 2026 and 2 October 2026. Plan fees, storage, network and free credits are left out. Pricing has every rate and every provider.

Who it is for

• You are building a product with AI agents: agents that write or run code, use tools, or operate software for your customers.
• Your company is venture-backed: it has raised from an accelerator, a pre-seed round, a seed round or a Series A, and a public page shows it. We check it before we accept.
• You have a company website, and you apply from the Runtime account the credit goes to.
• Your company has not been in Runtime for Startups before.

How it works

1. Sign in to Runtime and apply below, as an owner, admin or billing member of your account. Name who invested and link to a page that shows the round.
2. A person at Runtime reads every application, checks the round at the link you gave, and answers by email.
3. Accepted, your account is a paid account at once: any outbound port, custom domains, TCP ports, private networks and four image builds at once. The first month's credit is in your balance, and the next arrives each month on the day you were accepted. Your agents can start from llms.txt.

Until then, the free trial's 100 hours need no card.

Terms

• The credit is $5,000, added to the account you apply from in 12 monthly parts of about $417: the first when we accept your application, and the next on the same day of each following month, or on its last day if the month is shorter. You don't need a card.
• From the day we accept your application, your account is a paid account, with no top-up.
• It is spent like any other credit, on usage at the published rates. Unused startup credit carries over from month to month, and all of it expires 12 months after we accept your application.
• It is free credit: it has no cash value and cannot be refunded, transferred to another account or exchanged for cash.
• Each company receives it once. We review every application, check that the company is venture-backed before we accept it, and may decline any application.
• While your account is suspended, its monthly credit waits, and it arrives if the suspension ends. If your account is closed, the credit still to come stops.
• We may stop the credit still to come, stop counting your account as paid, take back unspent startup credit and suspend the accounts involved, if the credit came from false information, fraud, abuse or a breach of our terms.
• We may change or end the program at any time. A change does not affect a startup we have already accepted.

The full terms are section 6 of the Terms of Service. For agents: https://withruntime.com/startups.md is this page in Markdown.