CreateOS Sandbox vs Crusoe
Crusoe is for AI labs and enterprises that need dedicated multi-GPU capacity on current NVIDIA and AMD accelerators. CreateOS Sandbox, which has no GPUs, is for spinning up many short-lived isolated CPU environments for agent code. Crusoe's unit is a full VM with a 128 GB OS disk; CreateOS's is a micro-VM you can pause, fork or throw away.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Crusoe pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.
CreateOS Sandbox
Lower compute rate- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
Crusoe
- Compute
- $0.0400 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- See below
Crusoe lists on-demand H100 80GB HGX at $4.50 per GPU-hour and general-purpose CPU at $0.04 per vCPU-hour, billed per hour or per second, with no egress charge at this time, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Crusoe has the edge.
Pause with memory state and fork; Crusoe publishes no memory snapshot or fork.
Per-sandbox egress rules, where Crusoe's firewall defaults are not published.
Images built for agents, such as devbox:1 with Python, Node.js, Go, Rust and five coding agent CLIs preinstalled.
Where Crusoe is strong
Current NVIDIA and AMD accelerators in 8-GPU VMs and managed Kubernetes or Slurm clusters, no egress fees, no compute charge for stopped on-demand VMs, and SOC 2 Type II plus ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 (vendor-stated).
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- You run short-lived agent code on CPUs.
- You need fork for parallel attempts from one saved state.
- You want outbound locked to a list of hosts.
Pick Crusoe if
- You need 8-GPU VMs of B200, H200, H100, MI300X or similar.
- You want managed Slurm or Kubernetes for training.
- You need ISO 42001 from your GPU provider (vendor-stated).
Head-to-Head Comparison
Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 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 | Crusoe |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Running agent and untrusted code in isolated, disposable Linux sandboxes | Large-scale training and inference on 8-GPU VMs and clusters |
| GPU | None; no GPU shapes | Yes: GB200, B300, B200, H200, H100, A100, L40S, AMD MI300X, MI355X |
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Full VM (hypervisor not published) |
| Billing | Per second while running: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr | Per hour or per second on demand; reservations and spot |
| Pause and resume | Yes: disk, memory and CPU state saved; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill | Stopped on-demand VMs not billed for compute; OS disk keeps billing; memory snapshot not published |
| Outbound network | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Firewall defaults not published; no egress fees |
| Create by API | Yes: REST API, CLI, MCP server and SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0) | crusoe CLI, REST API, Managed AI API, Terraform, MCP server |
Common Questions
Is a stopped Crusoe VM billed?
Partly. Crusoe does not bill compute for stopped on-demand VMs, but the 128 GB OS disk keeps billing at $0.08 per GiB-month until the VM is deleted. A paused CreateOS sandbox stops vCPU billing while memory and storage keep billing.
Does Crusoe have a free tier?
Crusoe offers $5 of free credits for Serverless Inference and Fine-Tuning only, with none for VMs. CreateOS's Free plan includes 500 credits, one concurrent sandbox of up to 1 vCPU / 1 GB and 10 creates a day, with no card required.
Which is cheaper per vCPU-hour, Crusoe or CreateOS?
Crusoe's general-purpose CPU rate is $0.04 per vCPU-hour with RAM bundled, while CreateOS charges $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour plus $0.01159025 per GiB-hour of memory. Which is cheaper depends on how much RAM each vCPU needs.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.