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How much does a Cloudflare Sandbox cost?
Cloudflare Sandboxes run on the Containers billing model: a $5/month Workers Paid plan, then CPU at $0.000020 per vCPU-second, memory at $0.0000025 per GiB-second, and disk at $0.00000007 per GB-second. The plan includes 375 vCPU-minutes, 25 GiB-hours of memory and 200 GB-hours of disk before overage.
Those rates are published in the Cloudflare Workers pricing docs and were checked on 5 August 2026. Sandbox pricing changes; re-check before you budget on it.
The per-unit rate is the easy part. What decides your bill is which units you are charged for while the agent is doing nothing.
Why per-second rates do not tell you the cost
An AI agent spends most of its wall-clock life waiting — on a model response, a tool call, a human approval. A code-execution benchmark runs flat out. An agent does not.
That gap matters because vendors bill idle time differently:
- Cloudflare bills CPU on active usage only — a change made in its November 2025 CPU pricing update — but bills memory on provisioned resources for as long as the sandbox exists.
- E2B bills vCPU and RAM per second of sandbox lifetime, whether or not the CPU is busy.
- Daytona publishes a Windows rate of $0.0858/vCPU/h and $200 in free compute, but does not publish a general per-second rate on its pricing page.
So a comparison table of rates can rank three vendors in an order that reverses the moment your agent starts waiting.
What does a realistic agent workload actually cost?
Take 1,000 agent sessions a month, five minutes each, on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB of RAM, with the CPU genuinely busy about 20% of the time. That is 83.3 hours of wall-clock sandbox time and 300,000 sandbox-seconds.
Working it through on published rates:
Cloudflare
| Component | Quantity | Included | Billable | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU (active only, ~20%) | 120,000 vCPU-s | 22,500 | 97,500 | $1.95 |
| Memory (provisioned, full session) | 1,200,000 GiB-s | 90,000 | 1,110,000 | $2.78 |
| Workers Paid plan | — | — | — | $5.00 |
| Total | ≈ $9.73 |
E2B, billed on sandbox lifetime at $0.000028/s for 2 vCPU and $0.0000045/GiB/s:
| Component | Quantity | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU | 300,000 s | $8.40 |
| RAM | 1,200,000 GiB-s | $5.40 |
| Usage total | ≈ $13.80 |
E2B's Hobby tier is free with a one-time $100 credit, so that usage is covered for a while. Its Pro tier adds $150/month on top.
Both figures exclude egress and disk. That omission is the point of the next section.
Which costs do sandbox pricing pages hide?
Egress and idle memory are where an agent bill grows faster than the compute line. Neither appears in a per-second rate comparison.
Three things to check before you commit:
- Egress. Cloudflare charges $0.025–$0.05 per GB beyond an included 500 GB–1 TB, varying by region. An agent that pulls large documents or writes artifacts to external storage moves real volume.
- Idle memory. If memory is billed on provisioned resources, a sandbox left alive between turns bills the whole time — which is exactly the pattern a conversational agent produces.
- Monthly floors. A $150/month plan is irrelevant at scale and dominant at pilot scale. Model your actual volume, not the vendor's headline tier.
Cloudflare's own Sandbox SDK docs are the primary source for what a sandbox does; the pricing page is the primary source for what it costs. Read both.
How does CreateOS price sandboxes?
CreateOS publishes a pricing model rather than a rate card: per-second billing of vCPU and memory, no egress fees, no minimums and no monthly commitment. The AI Gateway is a flat 2.5% platform fee on the lowest available rate across nine providers.
We are not going to print a per-second number here that we would then have to keep in sync. CreateOS pricing models usage with you directly, because the honest answer for an agent workload depends on your idle ratio and your egress volume, and a headline rate hides both.
What is worth comparing is the model, not the number:
| Idle CPU billed | Egress charged | Monthly floor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | No (active only) | Yes, beyond allowance | $5 |
| E2B | Yes (lifetime) | Not published as separate | $0 Hobby / $150 Pro |
| CreateOS | Per-second vCPU + memory | No egress fees | None published |
If your agents are chatty and move data, the egress line is the one to model first.
Should you pick a sandbox on price?
Usually not — pick on isolation model and state handling, then check the price is not disqualifying. The cost difference between these providers on a pilot workload is single-digit dollars a month. The cost of choosing an isolation boundary your security team later rejects is a re-platform.
Start with what an AI agent sandbox is if you are still scoping, and with Firecracker sandboxes if the question is what the boundary actually guarantees.
Common questions
How much does a Cloudflare Sandbox cost?
Cloudflare Sandboxes bill on the Containers model: a $5/month Workers Paid plan, then $0.000020 per vCPU-second of active CPU, $0.0000025 per GiB-second of memory, and $0.00000007 per GB-second of disk. The plan includes 375 vCPU-minutes, 25 GiB-hours and 200 GB-hours before overage. Figures checked 5 August 2026.
Is Cloudflare Sandbox cheaper than E2B?
On a modelled workload of 1,000 five-minute sessions at 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, Cloudflare came to roughly $9.73 and E2B to roughly $13.80 in usage, before egress. The gap narrows or reverses depending on your idle ratio, because Cloudflare bills CPU only when active while E2B bills for the sandbox lifetime.
Does Cloudflare charge for sandbox egress?
Yes. Network egress is $0.025–$0.05 per GB depending on region, with an included allowance of 500 GB to 1 TB per month. For agents that move documents or write artifacts externally, this line can exceed the compute line.
What is Daytona sandbox pricing?
Daytona's pricing page publishes $200 in free compute, the first 5 GiB of storage free, and a Windows rate of $0.0858 per vCPU-hour. It does not publish a general per-second Linux rate, so a like-for-like comparison needs figures from their sales team.
Why is my AI agent sandbox bill higher than the rate card suggests?
Almost always idle time and egress. Agents wait on model responses and tool calls, so wall-clock sandbox lifetime is several times actual CPU work — and if memory is billed on provisioned resources, you pay for all of it. Check whether your provider bills idle CPU, and model egress separately.
How does CreateOS price sandboxes?
CreateOS bills per second of vCPU and memory with no egress fees, no minimums and no monthly commitment, and charges a flat 2.5% platform fee on the AI Gateway's lowest available provider rate. Exact rates are modelled against your usage rather than published as a rate card.
About CreateOS
CreateOS is the unified AI execution layer for the enterprise — route, govern, validate, observe. It runs agent workloads in Firecracker/KVM micro-VM sandboxes with fork, pause-resume, VPC and S3-backed disks, with kernel-level egress control via eBPF, and can run entirely inside a customer's own boundary. Built by the team at NodeOps.
Next step
Model your own numbers before you choose. Take your session count, average session length, vCPU and memory, and an honest idle ratio, then run them through the arithmetic above against each provider's published rates.
