CreateOS Sandbox vs Alibaba Cloud ECS
Alibaba Cloud ECS is the choice when servers must run in or near mainland China, or your stack already uses Alibaba Cloud. CreateOS Sandbox is the choice for disposable agent machines in the eu or us regions, billed per second with pause, fork and outbound allowlists. The two serve different geographies as much as different jobs.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Alibaba Cloud ECS pricing as published on 26 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.
CreateOS Sandbox
- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
Alibaba Cloud ECS
Pay-as-you-go ECS is metered per second with a minimum of 10, 5 or 2 minutes per hourly cycle for 1, 2 and 4+ vCPU; Alibaba Cloud lists unit prices by region on its pricing page (linked in Sources), and we could not read a current figure on 26 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Alibaba Cloud ECS has the edge.
No per-start minimum, where small ECS instances carry 2 to 10 minutes per hourly cycle.
Pausing stops vCPU billing (memory and storage still bill); a normally stopped pay-as-you-go ECS instance keeps billing unless economical mode is on.
Fork a paused sandbox, memory included, into new copies; ECS seeds new instances from disk snapshots and images.
Where Alibaba Cloud ECS is strong
The broadest public-cloud presence in mainland China and strong Asia-Pacific coverage, with per-second metering and an economical stop mode.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- Your agents run in Europe or the US
- Short tasks would keep hitting the ECS per-cycle minimum
- You want hostname rules for outbound traffic
Pick Alibaba Cloud ECS if
- Your users or data must be in mainland China
- You already run on Alibaba Cloud services
- You need GPU-accelerated instance families
Head-to-Head Comparison
Every dimension side by side, checked on 26 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.
| Dimension | CreateOS Sandbox | Alibaba Cloud ECS |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Full VM |
| Create and destroy by API | Yes: REST API, CLI, SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0), and an MCP server with create, exec and destroy tools | Yes: Alibaba Cloud CLI, OpenAPI, SDKs and Terraform; MCP not published |
| Memory snapshot (pause and resume) | Yes: pause saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing while paused, memory and storage still bill | No memory snapshot found; economical mode stops instance-type billing while stopped, disks and EIPs still bill |
| Fork | Yes: fork a paused sandbox into new, independent sandboxes | No live fork published; disk snapshots and custom images seed new instances |
| Outbound network controls | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Basic security groups allow all outbound by default; advanced security groups deny outbound by default |
| Billing granularity | Per second while running, no minimums: $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour, $0.01159025 per GiB-hour | Per-second metering; minimum per hourly cycle of 10 min (1 vCPU), 5 min (2 vCPU), 2 min (4+ vCPU) |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise (8 / 8 Pro, 4 / 4 Beginner, 1 / 1 Free) | Not documented on the pages we read (see Sources) |
| GPU | No GPU shapes | Yes, GPU-accelerated families (models listed on Alibaba Cloud's pages, see Sources) |
Common Questions
Does Alibaba Cloud ECS have a minimum charge per start?
Yes. Pay-as-you-go ECS is metered per second, but each hourly cycle has a minimum of 10 minutes for 1 vCPU, 5 minutes for 2 vCPU and 2 minutes for 4 or more. CreateOS bills per second while running with no minimum.
Do stopped Alibaba Cloud ECS instances keep billing?
A normally stopped pay-as-you-go instance keeps billing for its instance type unless economical mode is enabled; disks and EIPs bill either way. On CreateOS, a paused sandbox stops vCPU billing, while memory and storage continue to bill.
Is outbound traffic blocked by default on Alibaba Cloud ECS?
It depends on the security group type. Basic security groups allow all outbound traffic, while advanced (enterprise) groups deny it by default. CreateOS is open until the first rule, then deny-by-default, with rules matched by host, IP, CIDR or wildcard.
Sources
Checked 26 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.