E2B

Good for / not for

What it actually does

E2B is a sandbox as a service. Your agent writes code, E2B starts a small disposable cloud computer, runs the code there, hands back the output and throws the machine away. It exists because the alternative — letting a model run whatever it just invented on your laptop or your production server — is the thing nobody wants to do twice. That makes it the layer underneath code-interpreter features, data-analysis agents and coding agents that need to execute rather than only suggest. Pricing is usage-based on every tier. Hobby is $0 plus usage and comes with a one-time $100 credit: spend it and you are simply paying by the second, because it does not renew each month. Hobby sessions stop at one hour, with 20 concurrent sandboxes and 10GiB of storage. Pro is $150 a month plus usage and raises that to 24-hour sessions, 100 concurrent sandboxes — extendable to 1,100 — and 20GiB. Usage itself is $0.000014 per vCPU-second and $0.0000045 per GiB-second of RAM, which is cheap per run and less cheap at volume: community estimates put 100,000 runs of 30 seconds each at roughly $504 a month in sandbox time alone, before model costs.

Pricing and free-plan limits

Free tier: A one-time $100 usage credit — not a monthly allowance — with 1-hour maximum sessions and 20 concurrent sandboxes.

Three honest limitations

1. The free tier is a one-time $100 usage credit rather than a recurring monthly allowance. Once it is spent, Hobby is $0 plus per-second usage, and sessions are still capped at one hour.
2. Per-second billing is cheap per run and expensive in volume: community estimates on r/LangChain and r/AI_Agents put 100,000 runs of 30 seconds each at roughly $504 a month in sandbox time alone, before model costs.
3. Open issues on the tracker include unhandled TLS close_notify errors during command streaming (#1726) and stdout stalls after auto-resume (#1352).

Alternatives

• Browser Use — Choose Browser Use instead if the task is operating a website — clicking and typing — rather than running code.
• Firecrawl — Choose Firecrawl instead if you only need the contents of a page, which needs no sandbox at all.
• Langfuse — Choose Langfuse instead if the code already runs and what is missing is a record of what your app did and what it cost.

Getting started in 5 minutes

1. Sign up for Hobby and treat the $100 as a budget you spend once. It is a one-time credit, and there is no monthly refill.
2. Run one sandbox end to end — start it, execute something, read the output, let it die — before wiring it into an agent loop.
3. Size your work against the 1-hour session cap. If a job needs longer, that is Pro at $150 a month, where sessions run to 24 hours.
4. Do the arithmetic before you scale. At $0.000014 per vCPU-second a single run costs almost nothing; multiply it by your expected run count before committing.
5. Self-host only with the appetite for it: Apache-2.0, via Terraform, Nomad and Consul on GCP, with AWS in beta.

E2B questions

Why does an AI agent need a sandbox?

Because the code was written by a model rather than by you, and the only way to find out what it does is to run it. A sandbox is a disposable computer somewhere else: the code runs there, you keep the output, the machine is destroyed. Nothing it did reaches your laptop or your production server. That is the standard shape for code-interpreter features and data-analysis agents.

Is E2B free?

Hobby is $0 plus usage and comes with a one-time $100 credit. That is not a monthly allowance and it does not renew. After it is spent you pay per second: $0.000014 per vCPU-second and $0.0000045 per GiB-second of RAM. Hobby also caps sessions at one hour and gives you 20 concurrent sandboxes and 10GiB of storage.

What does it cost at scale?

Cheap per run, real money in volume. Community estimates circulated on r/LangChain and r/AI_Agents put 100,000 runs of 30 seconds each at roughly $504 a month in sandbox time alone, before model costs. Pro at $150 a month is still usage on top; what it buys is 24-hour sessions and 100 concurrent sandboxes, extendable to 1,100.

Can I self-host E2B?

Yes. It is Apache-2.0 and self-hostable through Terraform, Nomad and Consul on GCP, with AWS support in beta. That is infrastructure work rather than a checkbox, so it suits teams already running their own platform.

Is the project active?

13,686 GitHub stars, last pushed on 4 September 2026, with the Python package at v2.46.4 on 2 September 2026. A $21M Series A led by Insight Partners closed on 27 July 2025, with Decibel, Sunflower and Kaya participating. The company claims 88% of the Fortune 100 have signed up — its own figure.

Sources

• E2B pricing (Hobby $0 plus usage with a one-time $100 credit, 1-hour max session, 20 concurrent sandboxes, 10GiB; Pro $150/month; usage $0.000014/vCPU-second and $0.0000045/GiB-second RAM)
• GitHub repository (Apache-2.0, 13,686 stars, last push 2026-09-04)
• GitHub issues (unhandled TLS close_notify errors during command streaming #1726; stdout stalls after auto-resume #1352)
• Source code: Apache-2.0