Vercel — Active CPU billing
- Active CPU: 50K × 4 × 50% = 100K vCPU-hrs × $0.128 / vCPU-hr = $12,800
- Memory: 50K × 8 = 400K GB-hrs × $0.0212 / GB-hr = $8,480
- Total: $21,280 / month
Sandbox Pricing Calculator
Estimate and compare monthly sandbox costs across Vercel, Freestyle, Daytona, E2B, Modal using each provider's public vCPU and memory rates. Move the workload settings (hours, vCPUs, memory, CPU utilization) and every provider's monthly bill updates live.
Example estimates
At 50K sandbox hours / month, 4 vCPUs, 8 GB memory, and 50% CPU utilization, monthly compute costs are:
- Freestyle — $13,224 (wall-time billing) — lowest
- Daytona — $16,560 (wall-time billing)
- E2B — $16,560 (wall-time billing)
- Modal — $16,700 (active CPU billing)
- Vercel — $21,280 (active CPU billing)
Formula:
hours × vCPUs × cpuRate + hours × memory × memRate,
multiplied by utilization% on the CPU term for active-billing
providers.
Worked example at default state
The same inputs (50K hours / 4 vCPUs / 8 GB / 50% utilization) resolve differently depending on the provider's billing model:
Freestyle — Wall-time billing
- vCPU: 50K × 4 = 200K vCPU-hrs × $0.04032 / vCPU-hr = $8,064
- Memory: 50K × 8 = 400K GB-hrs × $0.0129 / GB-hr = $5,160
- Total: $13,224 / month
Providers
| Provider | Billing | $ / vCPU-hr | $ / GB-hr | Max vCPUs | Memory (GB) | Default-state cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Active CPU | $0.128 | $0.0212 | 8 | 16 | $21,280 | vercel.com |
| Freestyle | Wall time | $0.04032 | $0.0129 | 32 | 4–32 | $13,224 | freestyle.sh |
| Daytona | Wall time | $0.0504 | $0.0162 | 4 | 8 | $16,560 | daytona.io |
| E2B | Wall time | $0.0504 | $0.0162 | 8 | 8 | $16,560 | e2b.dev |
| Modal | Active CPU | $0.071 | $0.024 | — | — | $16,700 | modal.com |
Vercel
Active CPU billing — charged only for CPU cycles while the sandbox is running. Limits: max 8 vCPUs, max 16 GB memory.
- Active CPU: $0.128 / vCPU-hour
- Memory: $0.0212 / GB-hour
- vercel.com/pricing
Freestyle
Wall-time billing — charged for the full sandbox lifetime. Limits: max 32 vCPUs, max 32 GB memory, min 4 GB memory.
- vCPU (wall time): $0.04032 / vCPU-hour
- Memory: $0.0129 / GB-hour
- freestyle.sh/pricing
Daytona
Wall-time billing — charged for the full sandbox lifetime. Limits: max 4 vCPUs, max 8 GB memory.
- vCPU (wall time): $0.0504 / vCPU-hour
- Memory: $0.0162 / GB-hour
- daytona.io/pricing
E2B
Wall-time billing — charged for the full sandbox lifetime. Limits: max 8 vCPUs, max 8 GB memory.
- vCPU (wall time): $0.0504 / vCPU-hour
- Memory: $0.0162 / GB-hour
- e2b.dev/pricing
Modal
Active CPU billing — charged only for CPU cycles while the sandbox is running.
- Active CPU: $0.071 / vCPU-hour
- Memory: $0.024 / GB-hour
- modal.com/pricing
What is this?
This is a calculator for estimating the costs of running sandboxes on various providers based on their publicly available pricing data. This calculator provides a rough estimate, but does not include all factors. Vercel pricing includes charges for per sandbox creation and E2B/Daytona/Freestyle all bill for storage. These were excluded for simplicity and because generally speaking they are negligible compared to the CPU and memory costs.
This calculator is based on publicly available tiers; no beta or Enterprise/Contact Us pricing was considered. All providers have various discounts and committed-use options that are not reflected here.
When choosing a sandbox provider pricing is not the only important factor to consider. Security posture, performance, feature set and developer experience are all relevant factors that should be evaluated as well. For a good independent benchmark and comparison of features/performance, see Compute SDK's benchmark and other evaluations.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sandbox?
A sandbox is an isolated environment you spin up on demand to run code — most often untrusted or AI-generated code — without risking the host machine or your production systems. Each one has its own filesystem, network policies, and resource limits, so a bad command inside can't reach anything outside. In practice they serve as mini computers for AI agents — a safe place for an agent to install packages, run commands, and iterate on code.
The providers compared here (Vercel, Freestyle, Daytona, E2B, Modal) all sell this as a service: an API or SDK that creates a sandbox, runs code in it, returns results, and tears it down.
What is Active CPU billing?
Active CPU billing charges only for the CPU cycles consumed while the sandbox is running — if the CPU sits at 10% utilization, you pay for 10%. Vercel and Modal bill this way. Wall-time billing (Freestyle, Daytona, E2B) charges for the full time the sandbox is alive, regardless of CPU usage. Memory is billed for the provisioned size in both models.
Wall-time billing is more predictable — cost is a function of uptime, so you can budget from hours alone. Active CPU billing is more granular — you can optimize around it and potentially pay less, but the bill tracks actual CPU usage, which is harder to forecast.