Sandboxer vs Google Cloud Run

Cloud Run runs your container image as a request-driven, autoscaling service or job; filesystem is in-memory and instances scale to zero. Sandboxer gives you a persistent full VM. Pick Cloud Run for stateless web services and jobs on Google Cloud; pick Sandboxer when an agent needs a whole machine it can keep.

Checked against Google Cloud Run's public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Google Cloud Run compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Google Cloud Run
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Container in gVisor (gen1) or full-Linux-compatible second-generation sandbox Cloud Run jobs always use the second generation.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	partial Privilege escalation is disabled: no sudo or setuid binaries; the container runs as root if the image user doesn't exist.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Container images are the deployment unit; there is no equivalent of Docker's --privileged mode, and running a Docker daemon inside was not documented.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Idle revisions scale to zero by default; no pause/resume that keeps RAM is documented, and the writable filesystem is in-memory.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Not applicable: new instances start from the container image.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	partial Each service gets an HTTPS URL, but only one ingress container port (default 8080).
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	Up to 60 min per request for services Default 5 min; timeouts over 15 min need reconnecting clients.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	Per vCPU-second and GiB-second, rounded up to 100 ms (request-based or instance-based) Request-based also charges per million requests; free tier applies.
GPUs		NVIDIA L4 and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell; GA/preview status not stated on the page.
Self-host or open source		Managed Google Cloud service.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	About 43 regions (20 Tier 1, 23 Tier 2)

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Google Cloud Run

$0.32/hour

Instance-based billing, Tier 1 (us-central1): 4 vCPU x $0.000018/s + 8 GiB x $0.000002/s = $0.000088/s x 3,600 s; free tier and request fees excluded

List prices from each provider's pricing page, before free credits, plans and storage. This compares price only.

Where Google Cloud Run is strong

Scale to zero and per-second billing, with request-based or instance-based CPU allocation.
Standard container images in, an HTTPS URL out, with GPUs (L4, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell) available.
Wide region coverage with about 43 regions.
Services can handle requests up to 60 minutes, and jobs always use the full-Linux second-generation environment.

Where Sandboxer differs

Cloud Run containers have no sudo and no privileged mode, whereas Sandboxer sandboxes are full VMs with root.
Cloud Run's writable filesystem is in-memory and not persisted; Sandboxer keeps disk and, on stop, memory.
Cloud Run exposes one ingress port per service; Sandboxer exposes any port as an HTTPS URL.
Cloud Run has GPUs and many regions; Sandboxer has neither today.

Pick Google Cloud Run if

You are deploying stateless web services or batch jobs on Google Cloud.
You need GPUs or many regions with autoscaling to zero.
You want to pay only for request time on a managed container platform.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with its own kernel, root/sudo, systemd and Docker preinstalled, and nested KVM (/dev/kvm).
You want to stop a sandbox and resume it with running processes back, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) preinstalled, driven through a prompt API with streamed events, plus any port exposed as an HTTPS URL.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Google Cloud Run is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Google Cloud Run.

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