AI AGENTS · PRICING COMPARE
Agent sandbox pricing compare prices verified 2026-08-24
Capture-dated sandbox rate cards, ranked on your actual workload. Vendors without verifiable public rates stay unranked instead of guessed onto the chart.
Every figure above comes from the same ranked rows below — same inputs, same math, no hand-typed numbers.
| # | Vendor | $/vCPU-hr | $/GiB-hr | Total /mo | per sandbox-hr | × cheapest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | E2B $100.00 free credit | $0.05 | $0.02 | $82.80 | $0.1656 | cheapest |
| 2 | Daytona $200.00 free credit | $0.05 | $0.02 | $82.80 | $0.1656 | cheapest |
| 3 | Beam (sandbox) $30.00 free credit | $0.07 | $0.02 | $113.58 | $0.2272 | 1.4× |
| 4 | Modal (Sandboxes) $30.00 free credit | $0.07 | $0.02 | $119.00 | $0.2380 | 1.4× |
| 5 | Self-host Firecracker (Hetzner) | $153.59 host/mo | incl. | $153.59 | $0.3072 | 1.9× |
| 6 | Runloop $50.00 free credit | $0.11 | $0.03 | $158.40 | $0.3168 | 1.9× |
Not ranked — and why that's honest
- Morph — NOT CAPTURED: morph.so renders its pricing client-side — no rate constants in the served HTML or JS bundles, and its docs domain did not resolve from the capture network during the 2026-08-24 pass. Historical per-vCPU/RAM figures circulate in older comparisons, but we don't quote numbers we couldn't re-verify, so Morph renders unranked here.
Who should skip what
- E2B — Skip if your agents need long-lived environments — Hobby sessions die at 1h and Pro at 24h; this is for short-lived code-running sandboxes.
- Daytona — Skip if you want the most battle-tested SDK ecosystem — E2B has the larger community around code-interpreter sandboxes at identical rates.
- Beam (sandbox) — Skip if you want the biggest platform — young product; fine for browser/computer-use sandboxes, thinner on compliance and regions than E2B or Modal.
- Modal (Sandboxes) — Skip if pure sandbox price is the decision — you pay ~40% over E2B/Daytona for the same vCPU-hour; Modal earns it back only when the rest of your stack already lives on Modal functions.
- Self-host Firecracker (Hetzner) — Skip if usage is bursty or spiky — the host bills 24/7 whether sandboxes run or not; below roughly half utilization the managed providers win on total cost and you still own the pager.
- Runloop — Skip unless you specifically want its Devbox/Blueprint workflow — the highest per-hour rates captured here, with add-on fees on top.
Methodology
- All rates are published list prices fetched from official pricing pages on 2026-08-24; every row links its source.
- Model: compute = sandbox-hours × vCPUs × $/vCPU-hr; RAM bills separately at every captured vendor (hours × GiB × $/GiB-hr). Per-second and per-millisecond billing is normalized to hourly rates.
- Self-host baseline: a Hetzner CPX62 (16 vCPU / 32 GiB, incl. one IPv4) divided across its concurrent capacity at the reference profile (8 × [2 vCPU / 4 GiB]); other profiles scale linearly in vCPU×RAM. It deliberately EXCLUDES ops labor, image pipelines, backups, and idle time — the costs that usually kill the self-host business case.
- Excluded line items are stated per vendor: storage beyond free tiers, snapshot/object-storage fees, Axon coordination fees (Runloop), regional multipliers and non-preemptible surcharges (Modal), Windows images and GPU tiers (Daytona).
- Morph renders unranked because its pricing page ships no machine-readable rates and we don't quote numbers we couldn't re-verify this pass.