AI sandbox free credits

5entries, all verified offers

Code-execution sandboxes are the newest category on the ledger: isolated environments for running AI-generated code, billed by the second rather than by the month. Every platform tracked here currently ships a free credit or a free plan, which makes this the rare category where every row is an offer.

The table alone undersells how differently these platforms work, so below it each one gets a short note on what separates it from the rest, using only what their official pages state.

The ai sandboxes ledger

5 entries, all offers

Product	Amount	Type	Expiry	Payment method required	Last checked
Northflank	No cash credit; free Developer Sandbox plan	Always-free tier	Not stated officially	Yes	Last checked: 2026-09-18
Daytona	$200 in free compute	Signup credit	Not stated officially	No	Last checked: 2026-09-02
E2B	$100 (one-time)	Signup credit	Not stated officially	No	Last checked: 2026-09-02
Vercel	$0 per month Hobby plan	Monthly free tier	No billing cycles on Hobby; exceeding Sandbox quotas pauses creation until 30 days after first use	Not stated officially	Last checked: 2026-09-02
Novita AI	$100 (Sandbox only)	Signup credit	Valid for 90 days	No	Last checked: 2026-08-29

What separates these platforms

The columns above make the platforms look interchangeable. They are not, and the differences below are the ones their own official pages state. For which sandboxes offer GPUs at all, see the guide on AI sandboxes with GPUs.

E2B: Free money as a plain usage credit on the sandbox platform itself: $100 (one-time) on the Hobby plan, no card required to start. Sandboxes are ephemeral by design and billed per second, so the credit drains only while a sandbox is actually running.
Daytona: The largest stated credit on this page: $200 in free compute, with no card required. The catch is scope: the official billing docs exclude GPU sandboxes from the free credit, so it buys CPU sandbox time (billed per second for CPU, memory, and storage), not GPU experiments.
Vercel: Not a credit at all: Sandbox comes inside the $0 per month Hobby plan, with monthly allowances (5 CPU hours and 5,000 sandbox creations per month) instead of a dollar balance. Hobby is limited to non-commercial use, and exceeding the Sandbox quotas pauses creation until 30 days after first use.
Northflank: The strictest of the group: the Developer Sandbox plan is free (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 addon) but there is no signup cash credit, every account must add a payment method to create resources, and GPU workloads need a $50 or larger credit purchase first.
Novita AI: A GPU cloud and model API provider whose signup offer is sandbox-scoped: $100 in credits valid for 90 days, no card required. The scope is the catch: the credit covers Sandbox CPU and RAM only, not GPU instances and not the model API.

Related comparisons

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

E2B vs Daytona: one-time $100 E2B Hobby credit vs $200 Daytona compute, no card either way. The Daytona credit excludes GPU sandboxes. Checked 2026-08-24.

Related guides

AI sandboxes with GPUs: which exist, and what the free credits buy

Eight sandbox products compared on GPU availability, whether the free credit can touch a GPU, and what the credit converts to at official rates. Checked 2026-08-22.

VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or sandbox: choosing compute for AI work

A VPS suits always-on small services, GPU clouds suit training and heavy inference, serverless suits bursty jobs, and sandboxes suit untrusted agent code. How to pick.

This page lists only the AI sandboxes entries. The full credits index tracks all 55 entries across every category, with filters.