Best Sandboxes for AI Agents 2026: E2B, Daytona, More

A sandbox for an agent is judged on three things the hourly rate hides: how strongly the code is isolated from your systems, how long a session may live, and what you pay while the agent sits idle waiting on a model reply. A cheap rate on a sandbox that dies after 45 minutes, or that bills a full CPU while nothing runs, is not cheap for a coding agent. This page prices each platform per hour and for one month of agent work, using figures read on each vendor's own pricing page or docs on 21 October 2026.

Toolradar data: Toolradar, the software directory we run, finds a median entry paid plan of $20 a month across the 148 Cloud and Infrastructure tools with a verified price as of October 2026, and E2B's $150 Pro plan ranks 124th of them. That gap is why the free tiers and pure usage billing below matter: most agent prototypes never need a base fee. Modal is the most cross-shopped vendor on this list, listed as an alternative to 18 other tools on Toolradar.

Methodology: nine platforms that start isolated environments for untrusted or model-written code through an API, ordered by fit for agent work. We weigh isolation, free credit, session length, idle billing and the hourly rate for a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox. There is no hands-on benchmark here; every figure comes from the vendor. Pricing moves in agent infrastructure are the kind of change the Devshot daily brief flags.

An AI agent sandbox is an isolated, disposable computer, usually a microVM or hardened container, that an agent can start through an API to run code, install packages and read files without touching your own servers.

The headline rate is only part of the bill. Three vendors on this list charge exactly the same $0.1656 an hour for a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox (E2B, Daytona and Blaxel), yet a month can cost them very different amounts once base fees and free credit enter: Daytona has no plan fee, E2B's longer sessions sit behind its Pro plan, and Blaxel bills only active time by memory. Session caps decide whether an agent can finish a long task: E2B's free tier stops a session at 1 hour and Vercel's Hobby tier at 45 minutes.

Idle billing is the second lever. Vercel's own cost examples assume 10% CPU use because an agent spends most of its time waiting on a model, and at that load our arithmetic puts 100 hours at $11.04 on Vercel, $8.64 on Cloudflare and $9.52 on Fly.io Sprites. Platforms that bill provisioned CPU charge the same whether the agent is compiling or waiting. For the model bill that sits beside the sandbox bill, see best LLM APIs.

Methodology: on 21 October 2026 we read each vendor's own pricing page or billing docs and kept the figures they print. The pricing table below costs one workload, a sandbox with 2 vCPU and 4 GiB of memory kept busy for 100 hours in a month, using CPU and memory rates only. Cloudflare's 2 vCPU instance comes with 8 GiB, so its row uses that size. Free credits, included usage and plan fees are left out of the totals and listed in each card. How we weigh a page is on how we rate.

E2B's pricing prints per-second rates for each vCPU and memory size and the Hobby, Pro and Enterprise plans. Daytona's pricing prints hourly vCPU, memory, storage, Windows and GPU rates. Modal's pricing lists the sandbox rate per physical core, which equals 2 vCPU, and Modal's sandbox guide gives the runtimes and timeouts. Vercel's sandbox pricing docs list the Hobby quota and Pro rates in the default region, and Vercel's pricing page sets Pro at $20 a month per developer seat.

Cloudflare's Containers pricing applies to its Sandboxes. Northflank's pricing and its sandbox page give the vCPU and memory rates and the isolation runtimes. Blaxel's rate table bills sandboxes by memory, the Sprites site prints Fly.io's rates and plan terms, and Runloop's pricing lists devbox rates per hour and per second. Toolradar keeps profiles of Daytona and Northflank.