GPU Sandbox Pricing: Modal vs Daytona vs Thunder Compute (2026)

An H100 GPU sandbox starts at $2.95/hr on Thunder Compute and $3.95/hr on Modal and Daytona's on-demand tier. Daytona offers cheaper preemptible rates but sandboxes can be terminated without notice. All three platforms also charge by the second for vCPU, memory and storage, so GPU rates are only part of the bill.

This guide breaks down the GPU sandbox bill, and goes over billing rules that change the total. All prices were verified in October 2026, before volume discounts or region multipliers.

GPU Sandbox Pricing at a Glance

What a GPU Sandbox Actually Costs per Hour

A realistic H100 GPU sandbox costs $3.20-$5.29/hr across these options once CPU and memory are included. This cost table prices one H100 with 8 vCPUs, 32 GiB of memory and 100 GiB of storage at list rates.

Thunder Compute is about 20% cheaper than Daytona on-demand and 27% cheaper than Modal for this configuration. Daytona preemptible has the lowest hourly figure, but only if runs survive. An evicted run has to be paid for again.

GPU Rates for Other GPUs on Modal and Daytona

Modal and Daytona charge identical rates for every GPU but under different conditions: Daytona's GPU sandboxes are on-demand, and Modal's are preemptible.

Additional Billing

Three additional billable items beyond the GPU make a difference:

• Resources billed on top of the GPU.
• Preemption.
• Egress.

Thunder Compute, Daytona and Modal handle each rule differently.

CPU, Memory and Storage on Top of the GPU

All three platforms bill every configured resource for as long as a sandbox runs, not just the GPU. On Thunder Compute and Daytona, 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory add about $0.92/hr to an H100 sandbox. On Modal, the same resources add about $1.34/hr.

Resource sizing matters as much as the GPU choice. Thunder Compute and Daytona bill the vCPUs and memory you configure. Modal bills whichever is higher, your request or actual usage.

Modal Sandboxes Pricing: The Sandbox Tier and Region Multipliers

Modal Sandboxes pricing has two easy-to-miss details:

1. Sandbox CPU costs $0.00003942/physical core/second, roughly 3x Modal's function rate (one physical core counts as 2 vCPUs).
2. Pinning sandboxes to a region also multiplies prices by 1.15x for broad region selections like "us" and 1.75x for narrow ones like "us-west" (see the region selection documentation).

Modal GPU Sandboxes use Modal's standard GPU rates, and are preemptible only.

Daytona Sandbox Pricing: On-Demand vs Preemptible

Daytona's preemptible GPU rate is about 42% lower than its on-demand rate for every GPU. A Daytona H100 costs $3.95/hr on-demand and $2.27/hr preemptible. Preemptible sandboxes can be terminated without notice, keeping evicted sandboxes retrievable for 24 hours.

Daytona's two tiers also behave differently when GPUs are out of stock:

• On-demand requests wait until capacity frees up.
• Preemptible requests fail immediately.

vCPU, memory and storage cost the same on both Daytona tiers.

Egress: Modal's New Network Charge

Modal started charging for network egress on October 1, 2026. Modal's egress billing charges $0.04/GiB once a workspace uses its allowance for the billing cycle:

• Starter: 1 TiB included
• Team: 10 TiB included
• Enterprise: 100 TiB included

Egress covers traffic leaving a container's network interface, including private traffic to other Modal containers and uploads through Cloud Bucket Mounts. Reads from and writes to Modal Volumes don't count.

Idle Time: Timeouts and Auto-Stop Defaults

GPU sandboxes bill for the whole GPU while they exist, whether they are busy or not. A GPU that works for 10% of a session pays 10x of what it actually needs. The rest of the session usually goes to LLM calls and tool results.

Default timeouts cap how long an idle sandbox keeps billing:

• Thunder Compute sandboxes expire after 300 seconds by default, and the timeout can be disabled.
• Modal Sandboxes default to 5 minutes and can run up to 24 hours.
• Daytona sandboxes auto-stop after 15 idle minutes by default.

Set explicit timeouts that match the workload rather than relying on platform defaults.

Worked Example: 1,000 Coding-Agent Eval Runs

A month of 1,000 eval runs, each holding one H100 sandbox for 20 minutes, totals about 333 GPU-hours. The eval cost table uses the same 8 vCPU, 32 GiB configuration as the hourly cost table.

Thunder Compute saves about $333/month against Daytona on-demand and $470/month against Modal for 1,000 eval runs, with no evictions to bloat costs or complicate implementation.

For this workload, Daytona preemptible costs less only if:

• Evictions waste less than about 71 GPU-hours, roughly 4 minutes per completed run.
• Your eval harness already retries interrupted runs, so evictions don't add engineering work.

Daytona doesn't publish eviction rates, so teams have to measure lost GPU-hours on their own workloads. The 71 GPU-hour budget assumes an evicted run restarts from scratch and is billed until eviction. Reruns also delay results, and preemptible requests fail immediately when no spot capacity is available.

Run evals on non-preemptible H100 sandboxes on Thunder Compute.

Cheapest Sandbox for AI Agents: Which Option Fits Your Workload?

The cheapest sandbox for AI agents depends on job length and the cost of an interruption. Sandbox pricing for AI agents only makes sense alongside those two factors.

Short, Interruptible Jobs

Daytona's preemptible tier is the cheapest option for short tasks that can be retried. When a task takes a few minutes and the harness retries on failure, an occasional eviction costs little.

Long Evals and RL Runs

Thunder Compute is the cheapest non-preemptible H100 of the three. On long evals and RL rollouts, an eviction throws away the work already done. A run guaranteed to finish at $2.95/hr can end up cheaper than a lower rate plus reruns, and the gap grows with the eviction rate.

Read next

Best GPU Sandboxes for AI Agents Features, not just price, in our ranking of the best GPU sandboxes.

Free Credits and Startup Programs

Daytona advertises $200 in free compute, but free credits can't be used for GPU sandboxes and two new accounts we created in October 2026 each received $100.

Daytona's startup program grants $10,000 in credits on acceptance, with up to $50,000 at Daytona's discretion.

Modal's Starter plan includes $30 of compute credit per month after adding a valid payment method.

Last Thoughts on GPU Sandbox Pricing

GPU sandbox prices look similar at the headline rate and diverge once CPU, memory, preemption and idle time are added. A typical H100 sandbox costs about $3.88/hr on Thunder Compute, $4.88/hr on Daytona on-demand and $5.29/hr on Modal.

Price the full configuration you plan to run, then weigh what an interrupted run would cost before choosing a preemptible tier.

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