The same capability, without adopting a platform
If your application already lives on Vercel, their sandbox is the path of least resistance and you should probably take it. If it does not, this is the same capability as a plain HTTP API — a bearer token, five endpoints, and prepaid credit.
Side by side
| Here | Vercel Sandbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Standalone service. Any client that can make an HTTP request. | Inside the Vercel platform, alongside your deployment. |
| Billing | Prepaid credit, $0.09/hour at the entry size, by the second. No plan fee. | On your Vercel account, under that platform's pricing. |
| Isolation | One dedicated VM per sandbox, own kernel, single-tenant, destroyed on expiry. | Isolated sandboxes; see their documentation for the current architecture. |
| Exposed ports / preview URLs | None. A server inside a sandbox is reachable only on its own localhost. | Yes. |
| Interface | REST API and a hosted MCP server. No SDK packages yet. | SDK, integrated with the platform. |
| Max lifetime | 24 hours on any account. | See their documentation. |
| Commitment | None. Prepaid credit, so the most you can lose is what you topped up. | A platform relationship you may already have. |
The right-hand column describes what their product does, not what it costs — their pricing is tied to platform plans and we would rather link you to it than transcribe something that changes.
What "no platform to adopt" buys you in practice
An execution boundary that has no relationship with your hosting is worth something specific, and it is easy to undervalue until it bites.
- Your stack stays yours. A Django monolith, a Go service, a Rails job, a cron script on a box: all of them can create a sandbox with a POST. Nothing needs to move, and nothing needs a framework in common with us.
- The blast radius of a billing surprise is bounded. Credit is prepaid and the balance stops at zero, so the worst case is a stopped sandbox rather than an invoice. Nothing about it touches the account your production deployment depends on.
- You can leave. Five endpoints and an OpenAPI document is not a migration project. That is a weaker lock-in than we would like commercially and a better position for you, which is roughly the right way round.
- Agents can drive it directly. The MCP server turns creating, running and destroying sandboxes into tool calls, so a model can hold the whole loop — write a file, run it, read what it produced — with no code from you at all.
The honest version of this comparison
Most "alternative" pages exist to argue that the incumbent is worse. This one does not, because for a large group of readers it would be untrue: if you are on Vercel, the integrated option removes an account, a key and a bill, and those are real costs.
The case for a standalone service is narrower and specific. Your application is not on their platform. You want the execution boundary to have no relationship with your hosting. You want to see the machine's shape and its price on one line. Or you want to hand an agent an MCP server and have sandboxes become tool calls with no glue code. If none of those apply, take the integrated one.
Questions
What is the actual difference?
Where it lives. Vercel Sandbox is part of a platform you are presumably already using, billed on that platform's account, and it fits beautifully if your application is already deployed there. This is a standalone HTTP API with a bearer token: no platform to adopt, no framework assumptions, no relationship with where your application runs. If your backend is a Django app on a VPS, that difference is the whole decision.
Do I have to change how my application is deployed?
No. It is an HTTP API. Anything that can make a POST request can create a sandbox — a Rails job, a Go service, a cron script, a Lambda, a laptop. There is no SDK to install and no runtime requirement, which is the upside of a surface this small.
What does Vercel do better?
Integration, if you are on Vercel: one account, one bill, one dashboard, and the sandbox sits next to your deployment. They also expose ports for what runs inside a sandbox, which we do not — that rules out preview links for an app your agent just built, and it is the most common thing people miss here. And they are a large company with an SLA-bearing enterprise offering, which we are not.
And what do you do better?
Being unopinionated, and being cheap at the entry size. $0.09 an hour for 2 vCPU and 4 GB, billed by the second from prepaid credit, no plan fee and no seats. Each sandbox is a dedicated virtual machine with its own kernel, single-tenant, destroyed on expiry. And the API is small enough to read in one sitting.
Can I run this from a Vercel function anyway?
Yes, and some people do — a Vercel-hosted app calling this API for the execution part. There is nothing platform-specific in either direction. The one thing to watch is your function's own timeout: creating a sandbox takes about half a minute, so create it in a background job or a longer-running route rather than inside a request a user is waiting on.
Point your existing backend at it
No platform to adopt. $5 of credit on signup, no card required.