Sandboxer vs Prime Intellect Sandboxes

Prime Intellect Sandboxes are disposable microVMs that boot an OCI/Docker image, with checkpoints you can fork, public ports and unlimited timeouts, priced per vCPU, GiB memory and disk. They target high-volume RL rollouts and evals, with account limits up to 1,024 active sandboxes. Pick Prime for large cheap batches of short-lived images; pick Sandboxer for persistent full-Ubuntu VMs with SSH, memory-preserving resume and preinstalled coding agents.

Checked against Prime Intellect Sandboxes' public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Prime Intellect Sandboxes compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Prime Intellect Sandboxes
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	hardware-isolated microVM Hypervisor not named.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Root filesystem is a user-supplied OCI image; root access not stated.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	partial Boots an OCI/Docker image as rootfs and lists Docker among workloads; in-sandbox Docker daemon support not detailed.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Checkpoints save filesystem; no memory or pause documented.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Checkpoints can be forked.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	Public ports serve HTTP apps at public HTTPS URLs; tunnels also supported.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	default 60 min; max unlimited Negative value means no deadline.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per hour, vCPU + memory + disk Launch rates valid through Dec 22, 2026.
GPUs		partial Listed as coming soon; requires explicit grant.
Self-host or open source
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Prime Intellect Sandboxes

$0.18/hour

Launch rates through Dec 22, 2026: 4 vCPU × $0.02/h + 8 GiB × $0.0125/h (disk extra at $0.0002/GiB-h)

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

Where Prime Intellect Sandboxes is strong

Published launch rates of $0.02 per vCPU-hour and $0.0125 per GiB-hour.
High account limits: up to 1,024 active sandboxes and 102,400 creations per hour.
Checkpoints that can be forked, with sandboxes booted from any OCI image.
Public HTTPS ports and tunnels, with no maximum timeout.

Where Sandboxer differs

Per sandbox maximum is 16 vCPUs and 64 GiB; Sandboxer's largest listed size is 16 vCPU/32 GB (xlarge, on the $100 plan or higher).
Checkpoints store the filesystem only per docs, while Sandboxer stop/resume keeps running processes.
Rates are launch prices valid through Dec 22, 2026; the docs do not state later pricing.
Sandboxer includes SSH, systemd, nested KVM and preinstalled coding agents.

Pick Prime Intellect Sandboxes if

You run large RL rollouts or evals needing thousands of short-lived sandboxes.
You want to boot arbitrary OCI images.
You want a low published per-vCPU hourly rate for batch workloads while the launch pricing lasts.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want persistent VMs where resume brings running processes back.
You want a full Ubuntu VM with systemd, SSH and nested KVM.
You want coding agents installed in every sandbox.

Sources

Prime Intellect Sandboxes docs overview

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

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