ProvidersChecked 2026-10-28
Firecracker microVMs billed on measured CPU, with the strongest secret handling in this set.
Short answer: One always-on personal agent (2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 20 GiB) costs about $24.95 a month here, the 5th cheapest of the 11 providers that run it as described. The AI model adds about $14.70 a month on top (GLM 5.3, 30 requests a day at 40k tokens each, median zero-retention price; from $6.84 at the cheapest host). Fits well: An agent that mostly waits: measured CPU with a 50-millicore floor makes an idle hour about $0.03.
Runtime Cloud is a hosted fleet of Firecracker microVMs that an agent, or the program driving it, creates, runs commands in, pauses, forks and deletes over an API.
It is sold as compute for AI-agent workloads rather than websites or long-lived servers. The commercial pitch is that CPU is billed on measured use with a very low idle floor, so a sandbox waiting on a language model costs almost nothing.
Twenty products sit behind one API, CLI, MCP server and SDK set: sandboxes, secrets, images, volumes, snapshots, previews, desktop, metrics, webhooks, OpenTelemetry, TCP ports, private networks and more.
| Who it is for | Teams building agent products that execute model-written code, and teams migrating off a rival sandbox SDK: drop-in shims exist for E2B, Daytona, Vercel and Blaxel. |
|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker microVM on servers Runtime operates, with its own kernel; not a container and not gVisor. New sandboxes expose /dev/kvm, so nested virtualisation works. No GPU and no ARM: x86-64 only. |
| Sizes | No fixed size menu: any vCPU / memory / disk combination inside the bounds, which are 16 vCPU, 64 GiB of memory and 400 GiB of disk on a paid account. CPU is shared by default; reserved guarantees every vCPU at full price. |
| A personal agent here | About $24.95 a month for one always-on 2 vCPU / 4 GiB machine (2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 20 GiB), before the AI model. Change the numbers |
| Recommended in |
|
Our reading of the sourced material on this page, not a provider claim.
| Model | Prepaid credit, no plan fee, no seats and no commitment. |
|---|---|
| Meter | Per second: $0.025 per active vCPU-hour measured, with a 50-millicore floor per sandbox, plus $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour of memory. Storage while paused or stopped is $0.08 per decimal GB per 30-day month. |
| While stopped | Disk and saved memory blocks keep billing at the storage rate. Only delete ends the charge. |
| Plan fee | None publicly. Plans exist in a private beta with no published prices. |
| Minimum | No minimum billing period. Top-ups are $10 to $10,000, and an automatic top-up earns 5% extra credit. |
How Runtime lets you try before paying is on Trials and free tiers.
| Dashboard | Yes, a detailed console: a Home report with a Needs you section, sandboxes with Overview, Terminal, Files, Activity and Settings tabs, a limits page, and usage and billing with daily spend by product. |
|---|---|
| Without code | Partly, and only for the first step: one click starts a sandbox with a shell in the page on free hours. There are no app templates and no hosted agent, and the documented no-code path is pasting its llms.txt link into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. |
| Signup | A Google sign-in, no card and no waitlist. Free usage needs a verified sign-in and is withheld from data-centre or VPN addresses until credit is added. |
| Docs and support | Extensive, every page dated, with llms.txt bundles. Support is an AI agent in the same call, with humans for billing, security and data loss. The status page is public and specific. |
Every capability the guide checks, with the catch where Runtime's version falls short. Compare all providers
From the profile's company section: the legal entity, who funds it, and what a buyer can check before signing.
Runtime LLC, at a Denver, Colorado address. The state of formation is not published.
“These terms are a contract between you and Runtime LLC” withruntime.com docs-confirmed
No founder, executive or board member is named anywhere Runtime publishes.
not-published
Public since 18 September 2026, the first changelog entry. Nothing earlier than September 2026 is published.
“18 September 2026” withruntime.com docs-confirmed
Not published. No round, investor, accelerator or valuation appears on the site.
not-published
API checks passed 96.37% over 7 days and 98.87% over 30, against a 99% monthly promise with a 10% credit for paid accounts.
“Last 7 days 96.37%” withruntime.com docs-confirmed
The certificates on its trust page belong to suppliers, including its Virginia data centre. No Runtime-owned SOC 2 is claimed.
“Sandboxes, their disks and memory — Data center, Virginia — SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3 Type 2; ISO 27001” withruntime.com docs-confirmed
Shown as the research found them. A contradiction means the provider's own pages disagree; an open question means the answer is not published.
Only delete ends the storage charge. A stopped box is a bill, not a cleanup, and persistent: true bills memory around the clock.
The status page showed 96.37% over 7 days and 98.87% over 30 days against a 99% monthly promise at the time of research.
The start page says 100 free hours every month; the pricing and included-usage pages say an account that has never paid gets them once, across its first 30 days.
The docs name transitions and mention starting, running, pausing, paused, resuming, stopping and stopped, but there is no quotable list of state strings.
Everything runs in us-east. There is no EU option, and no per-tenant residency control.
A one-month-old repository, near-zero community discussion, and daily changelog entries including breaking changes. No preinstalled coding agents, and the vendor says no bridge harness has run on Runtime yet.
List-price illustrations from the calculator, not quotes. Prices checked 29 October 2026.
A · 1,000 short tasks
$9.17
2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 10 GiB (plan: Prepaid credit)
B · One always-on box
$54.54
4 vCPU / 8 GiB / 50 GiB (plan: Prepaid credit)
C · Three hours a day
$4.76
2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 20 GiB (plan: Prepaid credit)