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

Short versionDecision ledger

Rent	When	Example
GPU in a sandbox, official	Two products publish GPU sandboxes: Modal and Daytona. Daytona excludes them from the free credit; whether Modal Sandbox usage draws from the $30 credit is not stated.	Modal
Biggest card-free sandbox credits	Daytona $200, E2B $100, and Novita $100 need no card, and none of the three can buy a GPU minute.	Daytona
GPU silence	Cloudflare Sandboxes and Blaxel publish no GPU statement at all: not yes, not no. Treat absence as absence.	Cloudflare

A sandbox credit and a GPU path are different things. Check the middle column before the dollar amount.Checked 2026-08-22

Sandbox comparison sites document feature matrices well; comparesandboxes.com covers 48 products that way and is the right place for a feature-by-feature read. What no one documents is the intersection this page exists for: which AI code-execution sandboxes have GPUs at all, whether the free credit is allowed to touch them, and what that credit converts to at the vendor’s own published rates, all checked against official pages on a named date.

The short version: of the eight products in the table, two publish GPU sandboxes on their own pages, and neither pairs them cleanly with the free credit. Modal’s docs say “You can also run Sandboxes with GPUs,” but whether Sandbox usage draws from the $30 monthly credit is not stated officially. Daytona has GPU sandboxes and its billing docs exclude them from the free balance. Of the rest: Novita sells GPUs but scopes its credit to Sandbox CPU and RAM; E2B and Vercel Sandbox publish no GPU SKU for the product at all; Northflank requires a $50 purchase before GPU access, with no grant; and Cloudflare Sandboxes and Blaxel say nothing about GPUs in any direction, which on this site is recorded as “Not stated officially,” not as a no.

The table

Method

Inclusion. A product is in the table only if the vendor’s own pages call it a sandbox, a code execution environment, or an agent runtime. Modal calls Sandboxes “secure containers for executing untrusted user or agent code on Modal.” Cloudflare’s docs open with “Build secure, isolated code execution environments.” Blaxel describes “our flagship perpetual sandbox service.” E2B, Daytona, and Novita name their products sandboxes outright; Northflank’s free plan is named Developer Sandbox; Vercel ships Vercel Sandbox for untrusted and AI-generated code. One vendor was checked and failed this test; see the exclusion note below the table sections.

Sourcing. Every cell follows the same rules as the rest of this site: official pages only, checked on the date in the last column, official wording mirrored in quotation marks. When a vendor’s pages say nothing about a fact, the cell says “Not stated officially” rather than guessing in either direction. The six rows that already have credits entries reuse those entries’ verified amount, expiry, card, and date values unchanged; each provider link goes to the dated entry with its full source list. For Modal, the entry values carry their 2026-08-20 check date, while the Sandbox-specific claims were checked 2026-08-22; both dates appear in the row.

Conversions. Credit-to-hours math follows the Method section of Which free credits can actually buy GPU time and is not re-derived here. Conversions are shown only where an official rate exists in the checked pages. Each figure treats the credit as if spent on that one dimension alone; real workloads draw several meters at once, so the numbers are ceilings, not estimates.

No hands-on testing. This site collects and verifies credit terms against official pages; it does not run performance tests. Cold-start latency is therefore out of scope, and no vendor-claimed latency numbers are reproduced, since vendor-claimed numbers are exactly what dated verification is supposed to replace.

The GPU sandboxes: Modal and Daytona

Two products in this set publish GPU sandboxes, and they differ in what the free money is allowed to do.

Modal’s docs state GPU support for the sandbox line: “You can also run Sandboxes with GPUs,” with the caveat that “Unlike CPU Sandboxes, GPU Sandboxes are subject to preemption.” The beta VM Sandboxes variant is the opposite: “GPUs are not supported. VM Sandboxes currently only support CPU workloads.” Two product lines, two opposite GPU answers, both official.

Whether the credit covers that capability is a separate, unanswered question. Modal’s Starter plan carries “$30 / month free credit,” and the pricing page publishes Sandbox-specific rates: $0.00003942 per core per second for CPU and $0.00000667 per GiB per second for memory, with GPU listed as “See standard pricing.” What the official pages do not say, anywhere, is whether Sandbox usage draws from that same $30. The billing docs say monthly usage is charged “less any credits,” which is consistent with the credit covering Sandboxes but does not state it. That gap is recorded here as Not stated officially, and it stays that way until Modal’s own pages state the answer.

Daytona answers the same question explicitly, in the negative: the platform has GPU sandboxes, and its billing docs exclude them from the $200 free balance. The capability is published and the credit is barred from it, so the table’s middle column reads no rather than not stated.

If the credit does apply, the ceilings at Sandbox rates computed on 2026-08-22: $30 buys about 211 CPU-core-hours, or about 1,249 GiB-hours of memory, per month. No GPU conversion is shown because the Sandbox pricing table defers GPU to standard pricing rather than publishing a rate in place.

Credits that officially cannot buy a GPU minute

Daytona grants $200, no card, the largest sandbox credit in the set, with the GPU exclusion described above. Novita AI grants $100 valid for 90 days, scoped by its own registration terms to the Sandbox product, which is billed on CPU and RAM; the GPUs Novita sells are outside that scope. Northflank has GPU workloads on the platform and no cash grant at all: the free tier is the Developer Sandbox plan, a card is required, and GPU access requires a $50 purchase.

E2B ($100 one-time, no card) and Vercel Sandbox ($0 per month Hobby quotas) are simpler: neither publishes a GPU SKU for the product, so there is nothing for the credit to touch. For agent workloads that never need a GPU, that absence costs nothing; E2B’s $100 is the largest one-time card-free grant among the sandbox products with published per-second rates.

The cross-category version of this analysis, covering all 55 tracked credits rather than sandboxes alone, is in Which free credits can actually buy GPU time.

The GPU-silent pair: Cloudflare and Blaxel

Cloudflare Sandboxes went GA on 2026-04-13 (“Containers and Sandboxes are now generally available”). Pricing is inherited: “Sandbox SDK pricing is determined by the underlying Containers platform it’s built on,” and Containers bill per 10ms “with included monthly usage as part of the $5 USD per month Workers Paid plan.” The Workers pricing table lists the Free plan’s Containers columns as “N/A,” so there is no free-plan path; the $5 Paid plan includes 25 GiB-hours of memory, 375 vCPU-minutes (6.25 vCPU-hours, computed from the official minutes figure on 2026-08-22), and 200 GB-hours of disk per month. Across every Sandbox and Containers page checked, the word GPU does not appear once. Instance types are CPU, memory, and disk only. That is recorded as Not stated officially, not as “no GPU,” and not as “coming soon” either; third-party claims of either kind are not sources. The Workers Free plan underneath all of this is a separate offer with its own dated entry: an always-free daily request allowance, with the Containers columns that Sandboxes need marked N/A. Details: Cloudflare Workers free tier.

Blaxel positions itself as “Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents” built around “our flagship perpetual sandbox service.” The offer is “Up to $200 free credits” with “No credit card required.” Note the official wording is “up to”: the stated maximum is $200, and the pages do not state what amount an account actually receives, who qualifies for the full $200, whether it is one-time or recurring, or when it expires. Billing is memory-only: “You are charged for memory,” at $0.0000115 per GB of RAM per second, with CPU “allocated accordingly” and not charged separately. Fully spent on memory, $200 converts to about 4,831 GB-RAM-hours, computed 2026-08-22. GPUs appear nowhere in the pricing, docs, or quotas pages: Not stated officially. Blaxel also lists an Agent Runtime product marked “Coming soon,” which is not for sale and is not counted here.

Checked but not included: Morph Cloud

Morph Cloud (morph.so) was checked on 2026-08-22 and left out of the table, for a definitional reason: its official pages never call the product a sandbox, a code execution environment, or an agent runtime. The official names are “Morph Cloud,” “Devboxes,” and “CLOUD COMPUTERS FOR EVERY AGENT,” with sandboxing appearing only as a pain point Morph claims to remove.

Its free tier is also the clearest live example of why this site mirrors official wording instead of paraphrasing it. Three official pages give three different descriptions of the same plan: the subscribe page says “Starting credit allocation 300 MCUs” valued as a “100% Discount ($15 value)”; the plans docs say “300 MCUs free”; the signup docs and FAQ say “300 free compute hours per month.” MCUs valued at $0.05 each, a $15 figure, and 300 monthly hours cannot all describe one quantity, and no official page reconciles them. Anyone quoting a single “Morph free tier” number is choosing one of three conflicting official statements without saying so. Signup is also invite-gated; the signup docs begin “Once you have your invite” before describing the plan. If Morph’s pages converge on one description, it becomes a table candidate.

Choose-if conclusions

• Choose Modal if the sandbox workload needs a GPU today: it is the only product here whose own docs state GPU support for sandboxes without excluding the credit from it, with the caveats that a payment method is required and whether the $30 monthly credit covers Sandbox usage is not stated officially.
• Choose E2B or Daytona if the workload is CPU agent sandboxing and you want the largest card-free budget: Daytona’s $200 and E2B’s $100 need no card; neither credit can buy a GPU minute, Daytona’s by explicit exclusion and E2B’s by absence of a GPU SKU.
• Choose Blaxel if you want a card-free start and accept unstated terms: the stated maximum is $200 with no card required, but the awarded amount, recurrence, and expiry are all officially unstated, so verify what lands in your account before building on it.
• Choose Cloudflare Sandboxes if you are already paying for Workers: there is no free-plan path, and the $5 Paid plan’s included 25 GiB-hours of memory and 375 vCPU-minutes per month are official and dated.

Limitations

Everything above is documentation analysis with dated official sources, not benchmarking. No cold starts were measured; the column is reserved and every row says so. The Modal $30-to-Sandbox question and the Blaxel grant terms are the two facts most likely to change this table, and both are flagged Not stated officially rather than resolved by guesswork. All quotes were checked on the dates in the table; official pages change without notice, and each provider link leads to the dated entry that gets updated first when they do.