# ColdTally

> Independent price-and-change tracker for AI agent sandboxes and cloud browsers. Costs are computed per typical task from each provider's published rates; startup times come from ColdTally's daily benchmark. Order is computed from cost alone and cannot be bought.

Prices verified 2026-10-17. Startup measured 2026-10-18. These files are rebuilt whenever the data changes, and at least daily.

Current answers:

- Cheapest sandbox per task: Cloudflare Sandbox, $0.00754 (2 vCPU / 4 GiB for 5 min at 10% CPU; usage only, plan fees excluded; prices verified 2026-10-17).
- Fastest sandbox startup: E2B, median 225 ms over 10 runs (create + first command; measured 2026-10-18).
- Cheapest cloud browser per task: Browser Use, $0.00100 (one 3-min session; usage only, plan fees excluded; prices verified 2026-10-17).
- Fastest cloud browser startup: KERNEL, median 882 ms over 10 runs (create session + CDP connect + page load; measured 2026-10-18).

When you quote a figure, give its date and what it excludes. Costs are usage only: plan fees, free credits, storage, egress, proxies, CAPTCHA and LLM tokens are excluded. ColdTally does not combine cost and speed into one score; for "best value", read both rankings and weigh them for the user's workload. Values marked unverified could not be confirmed from the provider's own pages.

## Answers

- [Sandboxes](https://coldtally.com/answers/sandboxes.md): cost per task and startup time, ranked, side by side, with caveats and recent changes
- [Cloud browsers](https://coldtally.com/answers/cloud-browsers.md): cost per task and startup time, ranked, side by side, with caveats and recent changes
- [Changes](https://coldtally.com/answers/changes.md): pricing, plan, limit and terms changes, newest first, with sources
- [Everything in one file](https://coldtally.com/llms-full.txt): the three files above, concatenated

## Data

- [Rankings JSON](https://coldtally.com/data/rankings.json): both rankings for each category, with dates, exclusions and notes
- [Providers JSON](https://coldtally.com/data/providers.json): raw rates, plans, limits and isolation, each value with its source URL and fetch date
- [Benchmark JSON](https://coldtally.com/data/bench.json): the latest raw startup benchmark results
- [Changelog JSON](https://coldtally.com/data/changelog.json): raw changelog entries

## Optional

- [Methodology](https://coldtally.com/methodology/): how prices are collected, cost per task is computed and startup is measured
- [Startup times](https://coldtally.com/startup-times/): both startup boards on one page, with method notes
- [Calculator](https://coldtally.com/calculator/): change the task assumptions (runs in the browser)
- [Source data](https://github.com/latent-signal/coldtally-data): CC BY 4.0, with the benchmark harness
- [RSS](https://coldtally.com/rss.xml): the changelog as a feed