Agent sandbox pricing explained
Most agent sandbox providers bill per second for the vCPU and memory a sandbox uses while running, plus storage for snapshots or volumes; some add a monthly platform fee or offer free credits. Your bill is driven mostly by average session length, sandbox size and idle time, so auto-stop and pause/resume usually matter more than headline per-second rates.
How sandboxes are billed
- Compute: per vCPU-second and per GiB-second of memory while running. Some providers bill on reserved size, others on actual usage.
- Storage: snapshots, templates and persistent volumes, usually per GiB-month.
- Network: egress bandwidth, on some platforms.
- Plans: free tiers or starter credits, then pay-as-you-go or monthly plans with higher concurrency limits.
A worked example
Suppose a coding product runs 2,000 sessions a day, each 10 minutes on a 2 vCPU / 4 GiB sandbox. That is 2,000 × 600 s = 1.2 million sandbox-seconds per day, or about 333 sandbox-hours. At an illustrative $0.10 per sandbox-hour for that size, that is about $33 a day, or ~$1,000 a month — before storage, network or plan fees.
Now suppose sessions are left running for an hour after the user leaves. Idle time multiplies compute by six. An auto-stop timeout or pause/resume brings the bill back to the active-time figure. Idle time is usually the biggest lever.
Published rates by provider
| Provider | Pricing model | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| E2B | Per second: $0.000014 per vCPU-second (~$0.050/vCPU-hour) + $0.0000045 per GiB-second (~$0.016/GiB-hour). Pro plan $150/month plus usage; Enterprise from $3,000/month | Hobby plan: $100 one-time credit, 20 concurrent sandboxes, 1-hour sessions |
| Daytona | Per second: $0.0504 per vCPU-hour + $0.0162 per GiB-hour; storage $0.000108/GiB-hour after 5 GiB free; Windows $0.0858/vCPU-hour | $200 free compute for new users; startup program up to $50k |
| Modal Sandboxes | Per second at sandbox (non-preemptible) rates: $0.00003942 per physical core-second (1 core = 2 vCPU) + $0.00000667 per GiB-second; GPUs at standard rates. Team plan $250/month | $30/month credits on Starter ($100/month on Team) |
| Vercel Sandbox | Active CPU $0.128/hour (billed only while CPU is used) + provisioned memory $0.0212/GB-hour + $0.60 per million creations, plus storage and transfer (iad1 rates) | Hobby: 5 active-CPU hours, 420 GB-hours memory and 5,000 creations per month |
| Cloudflare Sandbox SDK | Cloudflare Containers rates in 10 ms increments: $0.000020 per vCPU-second (active) + $0.0000025 per GiB-second + disk; requires the $5/month Workers Paid plan | Workers Paid includes 25 GiB-hours memory, 375 vCPU-minutes and 200 GB-hours disk per month |
| Fly.io Sprites | Per second, compute only while active: $0.0385 per CPU-hour + $0.021875 per GB-hour memory; storage billed while idle | $30 trial credit for new organizations |
| Northflank Sandboxes | Per second: $0.01667 per vCPU-hour + $0.00833 per GB-hour; BYOC $0.02083 per node vCPU-hour plus your cloud bill | Free developer plan with up to $20/month of resources and one small BYOC cluster |
| Blaxel | Per second on allocated memory: $0.0000115 per GB-second (~$0.041/GB-hour) while active; standby billed as snapshot storage ($0.20/GB-month) | Up to $200 in credits, no card required |
| Together Code Sandbox | $0.0446 per vCPU-hour + $0.0149 per GiB-hour; custom pricing for large deployments | Not documented |
| Morph Cloud | Morph Compute Units at $0.05 each (1 MCU = 1 vCPU-hour + 4 GB RAM-hours + 16 GB disk-hours); Team $40/month incl. 1,000 MCUs | Developer plan $0/month (pricing page and docs disagree on included hours) |
| Beam Sandboxes | Billed by the millisecond: performance tier $0.05/vCPU-hour + $0.01/GiB-hour; cheaper shared and spot tiers; plans from $20/month | Developer plan $20/month includes $20 of credit |
| Freestyle | $0.04032 per vCPU-hour + $0.0129 per GiB-hour; Hobby $50/month and Pro $500/month credited against usage | Free plan: 200 vCPU-hours and 400 GiB-hours per month (no persistent VMs) |
| Koyeb Sandboxes | Usage-based on paid plans (Pro $29/month); sandboxes from $0.000001 per second (launch blog) | No sandbox free tier stated |
| AWS Bedrock AgentCore | Code Interpreter: $0.0895 per vCPU-hour + $0.00945 per GB-hour, billed per second; CPU billed on actual consumption (not during I/O wait), memory on peak | No product-specific free tier; general AWS new-customer credits apply |
| Azure Container Apps dynamic sessions | Code interpreter: $0.03 per session-hour (East US, Azure Retail Prices API), billed in one-hour increments. Custom container sessions billed on the Dedicated plan | None stated for dynamic sessions |
| Google Agent Platform Code Execution | $0.085 per vCPU-hour + $0.009 per GiB-hour, rounded to the second | Not documented |
| OpenAI Code Interpreter & Hosted Shell | Per container per 20-minute session: $0.03 (1 GB), $0.12 (4 GB), $0.48 (16 GB), $1.92 (64 GB); model tokens billed separately | Not documented |
| Kubernetes Agent Sandbox | Free and open source; you pay for the underlying cluster compute | Open source |
| Microsandbox | Free to self-host. Managed cloud (private beta): Free (5 compute-hours), Builder $49/mo (500 h), Teams $299/mo (2,000 h) | Self-hosting is free; cloud Free plan with 5 compute-hours/month |
| Docker Sandboxes | CLI and local sandboxes free, including commercial use. Cloud sandboxes metered per second; per-unit rates not published | Local use free; one-time credit for cloud sign-ups |
| Anthropic Sandbox Runtime | Free and open source | Open source |
Rates as published on each provider’s pricing page, checked November 8, 2026. Confirm current pricing before deciding.
Frequently asked questions
Which agent sandbox is cheapest?
Do providers charge while a sandbox is paused?
Cite this page
Agent Sandboxes. (2026). Agent sandbox pricing explained. agentsandboxes.org. Last reviewed November 8, 2026. https://agentsandboxes.org/guides/agent-sandbox-pricing/
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