E2B vs Daytona - $100 vs $200 free sandbox credits

E2B provides isolated cloud sandboxes that let AI agents safely execute code, process data, and run tools. Daytona is a cloud sandbox platform for running AI-generated code, billed per second for CPU, memory, and storage. Both hand new accounts a signup credit without asking for a card: E2B a one-time $100, Daytona $200. All figures below come from each vendor’s official pricing and billing pages, plus Daytona’s limits and sandboxes docs, checked on 2026-08-24.

The headline grants

E2B’s Hobby plan is labeled “Free + Usage Costs”: the plan itself is $0 per month, usage is billed per second while a sandbox is running, and new users get a one-time $100 usage credit. The pricing page lists it as “One-time $100 of usage in credits,” and the billing docs say “New users receive $100 in free credits to get started.” There is no monthly recurring allowance; the credit does not refresh.

Daytona’s pricing page says “$200 in free compute included.” It is a signup grant, not a monthly allowance, and the first 5 GiB of storage is free on top of it. Daytona also advertises a startup program with up to $50,000 in credits, but that is application-based, so do not read the $50k as something every new account gets.

Neither provider states an expiry. E2B describes the credit as one-time rather than expiring on a clock. Daytona’s wallet UI has a “See breakdown and expiration” control, but no public page states a validity window. Both entries record expiry as not stated officially, checked 2026-08-24.

The GPU catch

Daytona lists GPU sandboxes with per-hour rates, as of 2026-08-24: H200 at $2.61, H100 at $2.27, RTX PRO 6000 at $1.74, RTX 5090 at $0.74, and RTX 4090 at $0.57 per hour. But its billing docs state the free credit balance is “not available for GPU sandboxes.” So the $200 cannot buy a single GPU minute, and any post claiming Daytona hands out $200 of free H100 time is wrong on both ends of the sentence.

E2B’s side of this is quieter, and the two silences are not the same thing. Its pricing prices CPU and memory as separate per-second line items, and the official pages describe the $100 only as usage credits against per-second runtime, with no workload breakdown. My E2B entry records no GPU rate at all, so what the $100 covers beyond that runtime is not stated officially, and I will not upgrade the silence into an exclusion. The checkable facts are one-sided: Daytona officially bars its credit from GPU sandboxes, while E2B’s GPU coverage is simply not stated.

Same listed rates, twice the credit

At the rates both vendors listed on 2026-08-24, the two charge the same for the basics. Daytona lists vCPU at $0.0504 per hour and memory at $0.0162 per GiB hour. E2B lists its 2 vCPU default at $0.000028 per second and memory at $0.0000045 per GiB per second; multiplied out by this site (3,600 seconds an hour, not an official figure), that is $0.1008 per hour for the two vCPUs, or the same $0.0504 per vCPU hour, and the same $0.0162 per GiB hour for memory. So at list price the $200 is twice the vCPU and memory runtime of the $100 for the same sandbox shape, as long as the workload stays inside Daytona’s free first 5 GiB of storage; the storage terms differ, next paragraph.

Two priced differences sit around that. Storage: E2B’s docs list 10 GiB as free on Hobby, while Daytona’s first 5 GiB is free and storage costs $0.000108 per GiB hour after that. And Daytona prices Windows sandboxes separately at $0.0858 per vCPU hour, a shape my E2B entry has no equivalent for.

For scale, my E2B entry computes (2026-08-24, this site’s arithmetic, not an official figure) that the default 2 vCPU / 512 MiB sandbox costs $0.00003025 per second, so $100 covers about 918 hours, roughly 38 days of one default sandbox running continuously. Bigger sandboxes burn faster. I have not computed an equivalent figure for Daytona, because my entry records no default Daytona sandbox shape to price.

What happens when the credit runs out

E2B’s FAQ answers this directly: “Your account will be blocked. Add a payment method to continue using E2B.” So the no-card start has a defined end. My Daytona entry records no equivalent official statement about what happens when the $200 is exhausted, so I will not guess at it.

Idle timers and how credit drains

Daytona documents the timers that decide how fast an abandoned sandbox eats the grant. Auto-stop: “if not set, the default interval of 15 minutes is used,” and setting 0 disables it. The sharp edge for agent workloads is that internal processes do not count as activity, so a long-running task like LLM inference that takes more than 15 minutes without external interaction may auto-stop mid-process. VM sandboxes run on a different clock: classes that support pausing default to a 60-minute auto-pause with auto-stop disabled when neither interval is set. After a container sandbox stops, disk keeps billing until auto-archive, default 7 days (setting 0 means the 30-day maximum); an archived sandbox is not billed, and transitional states are billed the same as started. One more Daytona edge: GPU sandboxes are auto-deleted when stopped, which matters only once you are paying for GPUs anyway.

For E2B, my entry records per-second billing while a sandbox is running and nothing equivalent about idle timers or stopped-sandbox charges, so I will not claim how an idle E2B sandbox is handled. What the entries do agree on: sandboxes are ephemeral by design on both platforms, not persistent servers you leave running.

Signup and account caps

Both official pages say no credit card is required, and I mirror that wording exactly rather than extending it. E2B’s pricing CTA reads “START FOR FREE (✓) NO CC REQUIRED.” Daytona’s pricing page says “no credit card required,” and new accounts start in Tier 1 of its limits docs: a verified email, with resources capped at 10 vCPUs and 30 GiB of storage; the page’s two tables disagree on the memory cap, listing 10 GiB in one and 20 GiB in the other. E2B’s billing docs name the default sandbox as 2 vCPU with 512 MiB of RAM; my entry records no equivalent account-level cap for Hobby.

How to choose

Choose E2B if the documented Hobby baseline fits: $0 per month plus usage, 10 GiB of storage free, and $100 of runway, about 918 hours of the default 2 vCPU sandbox by this site’s arithmetic. Accept that the account blocks when the credit runs out until you add a payment method.

Choose Daytona if you want twice the grant at the same listed vCPU and memory rates, documented idle timers that cap the drain (15-minute auto-stop, 7-day auto-archive, archived sandboxes not billed), or Windows sandboxes at $0.0858 per vCPU hour. Accept that the $200 never pays for GPU sandboxes.

I have not personally run agents against either grant, so this page reports only what the official pages state. The full fine print is in the E2B Hobby $100 and Daytona $200 credit entries. For the broader decision, read how to choose between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox. Every grant I track is on the credits index.