Northflank Sandboxes
https://northflank.com/product/sandboxes
Northflank Sandboxes are microVM-backed container workloads for running untrusted code (LLM-generated, user-submitted, AI agent, CI/CD). Each sandbox is a single deployment service that boots in under a second, with VM-level isolation and container-level performance. The product is built into the broader Northflank runtime platform (services, jobs, databases, build pipelines), and can be run on Northflank's managed infrastructure or in a customer's own VPC across AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, on-prem, or bare metal.
| Pricing model | Per-second usage-based billing on vCPU and memory |
|---|---|
| Pricing The headline compute price as the provider states it. Sorting ranks prices stated per vCPU over time, converted to hourly. Other pricing models sort after, unranked. | $0.01667/vCPU-hour |
| Free while idle Whether a stopped, paused, or sleeping sandbox costs nothing. | ✕ |
| Elastic Resources flex with what the sandbox actually uses, and the bill follows: yes when the provider bills on active or observed use, no when capacity is reserved or allocated and billed while it runs. | ✓ |
| Memory snapshots Whether RAM state survives a pause and resume, not just disk. | ✕ |
| Wake on request Whether a stopped sandbox wakes automatically on inbound traffic. | ✕ |
| Start / resume Typical time from create or resume to running. Sorting ranks stated times, converted to seconds; claims with no figure sort after, unranked. | Under 1 second (microVMs boot in <1s; P99 allocate ~566ms, P99 readiness ~733ms per ComputeSDK 2026 benchmark) |
| Max runtime The longest a sandbox may run. | No fixed limit |
| Isolation The isolation technology between sandboxes. | MicroVM via Firecracker, gVisor, Kata Containers, and Cloud Hypervisor |
| GPUs Whether GPU instances are available for sandboxes. | ✓ |
| Docker Whether Docker containers can run inside the sandbox. | ✓ |
| SDKs | JavaScript |
✓ yes · ✕ no · – no cited public fact.
Pause/resume works by scaling to zero: persistent volumes and configuration are retained, but RAM state is not snapshotted, so resuming requires a cold boot.
Sources
- https://northflank.com/product/sandboxes
- https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/sandboxes/sandboxes-on-northflank
- https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/sandboxes/deploy-sandboxes-on-northflank
- https://northflank.com/blog/remote-code-execution-sandbox
- https://northflank.com/blog/top-byoc-ai-sandboxes
- https://northflank.com/deploy/run-persistent-and-ephemeral-docker-containers
- https://northflank.com/docs/v1/api/use-the-javascript-client
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/%40northflank/js-client
- https://pypi.org/project/northflank/
- https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/billing/pricing-on-northflank
- https://northflank.com/blog/ai-sandbox-pricing
- https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-spin-up-a-secure-code-sandbox-and-microvm-in-seconds-with-northflank-firecracker-gvisor-kata-clh
- https://northflank.com/blog/ephemeral-sandbox-environments
Last verified 2026-08-17. Corrections land through the update log.