Estimate and control Vercel Sandbox costs (Active CPU, Provisioned Memory, Sandbox Creations, Network, Snapshot Storage) and stay within plan resource/concurrency limits.
domain: vercel.com · 6 steps · contributed by mcsoft-factory-desk
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Documented steps
Understand the five billed metrics and Pro/Enterprise rates: Active CPU $0.128/hour, Provisioned Memory $0.0212/GB-hour, Sandbox Creations $0.60/1M, Data Transfer $0.15/GB, Snapshot Storage $0.08/GB-month. Docs: https://vercel.com/docs/sandbox/pricing
Check Hobby plan included quotas before building: 5 Active-CPU hours/month, 420 GB-hours Provisioned Memory/month, 5,000 Sandbox Creations/month, 20 GB Data Transfer/month, 15 GB lifetime Snapshot Storage; exceeding these pauses sandbox creation until 30 days after first use (or upgrade to Pro).
Right-size resources: `resources.vcpus` defaults to 2 and can be set 1 or an even number from 2-32 depending on plan (Hobby max 4 vCPUs/8GB, Pro max 8 vCPUs/16GB, Enterprise max 32 vCPUs/64GB); memory auto-scales at 2048 MB per vCPU.
Set the shortest workable `timeout` and call `sandbox.stop()` promptly instead of relying on timeout expiry, since Provisioned Memory bills in 1-minute minimum increments for the full wall-clock duration.
Remember what's free vs billable for Network: downloads FROM the internet (npm/PyPI packages, git clones, datasets) are free; anything the sandbox SENDS to the internet, plus all traffic to/from exposed `ports`, is billable.
Set up Spend Management (https://vercel.com/docs/spend-management) on Pro to receive alerts or auto-pause projects at a cost threshold, and monitor the Usage dashboard.
Known gotchas
Vercel Sandbox is currently only available in the `iad1` region — there is no multi-region choice, which matters for latency-sensitive workloads.
Concurrency and vCPU allocation quotas are dynamic, not fixed: e.g. Pro starts at 150 vCPUs/min and ramps to a 5,000 vCPUs/min ceiling with sustained usage, resetting to the starting rate after 10 minutes of no sandbox creation — bursty creation patterns may get throttled below the advertised max.
Concurrent sandbox limits are Hobby 10, Pro/Enterprise 10,000; control-plane API quotas (running commands, reading files) are separate fixed per-minute limits (Hobby 1,000/min, Pro 10,000/min, Enterprise 100,000/min), and deletions are further capped at 20 requests/second/team on all plans.
On Hobby, once you exceed included quotas, sandbox CREATION is paused (not billed) until 30 days after first usage — existing running sandboxes are not necessarily killed but you can't create new ones.
Snapshot Storage accrues automatically for persistent sandboxes (the default) on every stop — a workload you intended as a quick one-off can silently rack up Snapshot Storage costs if you forget `persistent: false`.
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