# Morph Cloud alternatives in 2026: 15 agent sandboxes ranked by cost Runtime Cloud (withruntime.com) costs 62% less than Morph. It also forks a running sandbox with its memory. ## What is the best alternative to Morph? It depends on whether live branching with memory is the point of your setup. For agents that mostly wait on a model, Runtime forks a running sandbox with its memory. It bills the CPU your code uses, so the job below costs $0.64, against $1.67 on Morph. If Infinibranch's hundreds of replicas from one machine are what you rely on, Morph remains a strong fit. Pick Daytona or Modal for GPUs, and Cloudflare Sandbox for apps on Workers. ## Why do teams look beyond Morph? Morph bills in MCUs, Morph Compute Units. One MCU covers 1 vCPU, 4 GB of memory or 16 GB of disk. A machine pays for as many MCUs as its largest need, for as long as it runs. The reasons to move come from that unit: - **The full size while it runs.** A 2 vCPU machine is 2 MCUs an hour, whether its CPUs are busy or waiting on a model. Runtime measures the CPU your code uses, so waiting costs a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU. - **CPU and memory move together.** A machine that needs 8 GB and 1 vCPU still pays for 2 MCUs. Runtime prices vCPUs and memory apart. - **Credit comes through plans.** The Team plan is $40 a month with 1,000 MCUs of starting credit, and Scale is $250 with 7,500. Runtime is prepaid credit from $10, with 100 free hours of a 1 GB machine in the first 30 days. ## Which alternatives are cheapest? List rates, one job: 1,000 runs of 60 seconds on a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox, which spends 20 CPU-seconds of each run working. Morph needs 2 MCUs an hour for that shape and ranks sixth. The arithmetic for each line is on [pricing](/docs/pricing#published-rate-comparison). Plan fees, storage, network, free credits and negotiated prices are not in it. | # | Provider | Isolation | CPU billed on | 1,000 runs | | --- | ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | --------------------------------------- | -----------------------: | | 1 | **Runtime Cloud** | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Measured CPU, with a small floor | **$0.64** | | 2 | Northflank | microVMs for CPU work, gVisor for GPU work | Allocated vCPUs | $1.11 | | 3 | Cloudflare Sandbox (2 vCPU, 6 GiB, 12 GB disk) | A container in its own VM | Active CPU | $1.35 | | 4 | Prime Sandboxes (5 GiB disk) | microVM, own guest kernel | Allocated vCPUs while running | $1.52 | | 5 | Fly Machines, `performance-2x` with 4 GB | Firecracker microVM | The machine's size while started | $1.53 | | 6 | Morph, 2 MCUs, the one you are replacing | Full virtual machines | The machine's size in MCUs | $1.67 | | 7 | Vercel Sandbox, `iad1` (4 GB) | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Active CPU | $2.12 | | 8 | Freestyle (32 GiB disk) | Full Linux virtual machines | Allocated vCPUs | $2.25 | | 9 | Fly Sprites (4 GB in use) | Firecracker microVM | Measured CPU | $2.40 | | 10 | CodeSandbox SDK, a Nano VM | Firecracker microVM | The VM's size, by the minute rounded up | $2.48 | | 11 | E2B | Firecracker microVM, own kernel | Allocated vCPUs | $2.76 | | 12 | Daytona | Containers by default; VM class separate | Allocated vCPUs | $2.76 | | 13 | Blaxel (4 GB) | Lightweight virtual machines | Included with memory, active time | $3.45 | | 14 | Modal Sandboxes (1 physical core) | gVisor, a user-space kernel | Requested or used, whichever is higher | $3.97 | | 15 | AWS Lambda MicroVMs, Arm | Firecracker microVM | Baseline vCPUs while running | $4.20 | | 16 | Runloop, a `MEDIUM` devbox | microVM, with a container inside | Allocated CPUs while running | $5.33 | ## Cost for the same job The working for Runtime, Morph, and two microVM providers that bill differently: one on active CPU and one on allocation. ``` Runtime CPU 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025 = $0.14 Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075 = $0.50 Total $0.64 Morph Size 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 MCU × $0.05 = $1.67 Vercel CPU 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.128 = $0.71 Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0212 = $1.41 Total $2.12 E2B CPU 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.0504 = $1.68 Memory 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0162 = $1.08 Total $2.76 ``` An MCU is billed in full whether it computes or not. So with both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job still costs $1.67 on Morph, against $1.33 on Runtime, $5.68 on Vercel, and $2.76 on E2B. Runtime remains the cheapest of the four at any load. A month of 100,000 waiting runs costs $63.89 on Runtime and $166.67 on Morph. ## How each alternative serves a Morph user ### 1. Northflank: separate meters, lowest allocation $0.01667 per vCPU-hour and $0.00833 per GB-hour. Memory and CPU need not grow together as MCUs do. Sandboxes are services with deployment plans, in Northflank's regions or your AWS, GCP or Azure account. ### 2. Cloudflare Sandbox: Workers apps Active CPU at $0.072 per vCPU-hour, with 3 GiB per vCPU at minimum. You reach it from a Worker on the Workers Paid plan. Public-beta filesystem snapshots restore saved files after a stop. Memory and processes restart. ### 3. Fly Machines: memory kept through suspend `performance-2x` with 4 GB is $0.0916704 an hour in `iad`, busy or not, across 17 regions. Suspend holds a Machine's memory. The root disk is temporary. ### 4. Vercel Sandbox: filesystem forks only Firecracker microVMs at $0.128 per active CPU-hour and $0.0212 per GB-hour in `iad1`. Its snapshots and forks copy the filesystem, and processes start over. ### 5. CodeSandbox SDK: memory snapshot and restore The Nano VM (2 cores, 4 GB) costs $0.1486 an hour, rounded up to the minute. It can snapshot and restore memory. VMs go as large as 64 cores and 128 GB. ### 6. E2B: allocation on microVMs $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour. Sessions end after 1 hour on Hobby and 24 on the $150-a-month Pro plan. ### 7. Daytona: GPUs and Windows E2B's rates, containers unless you pick the VM class, GPU sandboxes and Windows machines in the US and the EU. ### 8. Blaxel: standby that keeps processes Active memory at $0.0000115 per GB-second, CPU included. Standby snapshots hold files and processes for $0.20 per GB a month. Resuming takes about 25 ms. ### 9. Fly Sprites: sleeps on its own $0.0385 per measured CPU-hour and $0.021875 per GB-hour of memory in use. A Sprite keeps its memory for a while after sleeping, and its 100 GB disk always. ### 10. Modal Sandboxes: GPUs beside functions gVisor, and CPU at $0.1419 per physical core-hour on the greater of request and use. ### 11. Runloop: evaluation tooling $0.108 per CPU-hour and $0.0252 per GB-hour plus disk, with tools to evaluate models on your own workload. ## Runtime Cloud Runtime runs Morph's workload for 62% less, and it still forks a running sandbox with its memory. The same 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox cost $0.64 on Runtime and $1.67 on Morph. That is $103 a month saved at 100,000 runs, with no monthly plan to buy credit through. This puts Runtime first in the table above. Rates were checked 25 October 2026. Each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel. CPU is measured, at $0.025 per vCPU-hour with a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU. Memory is reserved at $0.0075 per GiB-hour, set apart from the vCPU count. One fork call turns a running sandbox into 1 to 100 copies with its files, memory and processes. A snapshot saves that state to start more from later. To see a fork for yourself, sign in with `npx withruntime login` and start free. Moving Morph code is covered below and in the [migration guide](/docs/migrate). ## How to switch from Morph The pattern most Morph projects rely on, preparing a machine once and branching it, is a fork on Runtime. It copies the sandbox as it is now, running: ```ts check import { Runtime, Sandbox } from "withruntime"; const runtime = new Runtime(); await using base = await Sandbox.create(); await base.exec("pip install --quiet requests"); const [a, b] = await base.fork({ count: 2 }); // both running, answered together await Promise.all([a!.stop(), b!.stop()]); // Or keep the machine to start copies from later: const snapshot = await base.snapshot({ name: "with-requests", retentionDays: 7 }); await using later = await runtime.sandboxes.create({ snapshot: snapshot.id }); await runtime.snapshots.delete(snapshot.id); ``` A plain run is a create, an `exec` and a stop: ```python from withruntime import Sandbox with Sandbox.create() as box: box.files.write("/workspace/invoice.py", "print(sum([125, 250, 375]))\n") print(box.exec("python3 /workspace/invoice.py", check=True).stdout) ``` If a coding agent should do the work, give it the instruction in [migration](/docs/migrate). It ports the project on a branch, runs it on the free usage, and reports the monthly saving. After a few runs, `npx withruntime compare --from morph` shows what your own sandboxes would have cost at Morph's published rates. More on branching: [sandbox fork](/glossary/sandbox-fork) and [RL environments](/use-cases/rl-environments). ## Sources - [Cloudflare sandbox lifetime](https://developers.cloudflare.com/sandbox/concepts/lifetime/), snapshot behavior checked 25 October 2026. Rival rates were checked 25 October 2026, and Morph's pricing page was read again on 26 October 2026. - [Morph Cloud pricing](https://cloud.morph.so/web/pricing) - [Northflank pricing](https://northflank.com/pricing) Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026. - [Fly.io pricing](https://fly.io/pricing/) - [E2B pricing](https://e2b.dev/pricing) - [Runloop pricing](https://www.runloop.ai/pricing) - [Vercel Sandbox pricing](https://vercel.com/docs/sandbox/pricing) - [Together: CodeSandbox SDK](https://docs.together.ai/docs/together-code-sandbox-legacy) - [Modal pricing](https://modal.com/pricing) - [Blaxel pricing](https://blaxel.ai/pricing) - [Cloudflare Containers pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/pricing/) - [Daytona pricing](https://www.daytona.io/pricing) - Runtime [pricing](/docs/pricing) and the [Morph comparison](/docs/morph-alternative)