- Free allowance
- Hobby is USD 0 a month with 'One-time $100 in usage credits', 'Up to 20 concurrently running sandboxes', 'Up to 1 hour per sandbox session', '10 GiB of sandbox storage, included' and 'No credit card required to start.'
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tierpaid plans from USD 120.89/month
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- retention-clamped1 hour maximum continuous runtime per sandbox on Hobby
- Evidence
- documented11 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-24checked 2026-10-24 (live); stale on 2026-11-24
| Free tier | Hobby is USD 0 a month with 'One-time $100 in usage credits', 'Up to 20 concurrently running sandboxes', 'Up to 1 hour per sandbox session', '10 GiB of sandbox storage, included' and 'No credit card required to start.' unit mixed; metered on wall-clock; The credit is one time and does not reset. Running sandboxes are billed per second on provisioned CPU and RAM. |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - volume-quota USD 100 one-time usage credit source
- retention-clamped (binding) 1 hour maximum continuous runtime per sandbox on Hobby source
- volume-quota 20 concurrent sandboxes on Hobby source
- write-gated with no payment method on file, 'every project in your workspace is blocked shortly afterwards' once credits run out source
The 1-hour continuous runtime is the headline difference between Hobby and the USD 150 a month Pro plan, so the time cap is a plan gate rather than a technical ceiling. It resets on pause and resume. |
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| Binding | retention-clamped One hour of continuous runtime per session is the constraint that decides the row: no arrangement of the credit produces a machine that is up for a month, only 604 one-hour sessions. |
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| Identity | email The console signup at console.e2b.dev/registration renders 'Sign up with a social provider or your email.' with 'Continue with GitHub', 'Continue with Google', or fields for 'E-Mail', 'Name' and 'Password'. No phone field and no card field. The pricing page states 'No credit card required to start.' No hold exists because no payment method is taken at signup. |
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| Egress | No egress charge or allowance is stated on the pricing page; sandbox storage is stated free and the page prices CPU and RAM only. Outbound traffic leaves from ephemeral rotating IPs with no published CIDR list. |
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| Per-object cap | Sandboxes can be configured with 1 to 8 vCPUs and 1 to 8 GiB of RAM; the default sandbox has 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB. Storage is 10 GiB on Hobby. |
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| Retention | Sandbox storage is included with every plan at no extra cost; a paused sandbox keeps its filesystem and its memory. 'Paused sandbox retention: Unlimited' on every plan. |
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| Interface | rest, cli SDK (Python, JavaScript) over a REST API; Sandbox.create() plus pause and resume |
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| Tooling | e2b Python and Node SDKs; templates; sandbox pause and resume |
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| Composes with | pause keeps memory, so a long agent run resumes mid-process rather than replaying its setup |
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| Reliability | A sandbox that hits the one-hour limit is destroyed and its in-memory state is lost unless it was paused or snapshotted first; the default timeout when none is set is 5 minutes. |
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| Notes | Arithmetic, recomputed today: 2 vCPU x USD 0.0504 + 4 GiB x USD 0.0162 + 0 storage = USD 0.1656 an hour. USD 100 / 0.1656 = 603.9 h = 25.2 days at 24/7, and a 730-hour month would cost USD 120.89. But those 604 hours cannot be taken as a continuous machine: Hobby caps continuous runtime at 1 hour, so they are 604 sessions of one hour or less, and the credit is the smaller constraint only in the sense that it runs out second. At the maximum shape, 8 vCPU / 8 GiB, the hour is USD 0.5328 and USD 100 buys 187.7 h = 7.8 days, still in one-hour slices. GPU trap: not applicable, because E2B states it sells no GPU at all, so there is no advertised product the credit fails to cover. The real catch is the card AFTER the credit, not before: 'If you have no payment method, every project in your workspace is blocked shortly afterwards. Add a payment method to continue using E2B.' That is a hard stop at the end of the USD 100 with no free path onward. Pausing is unlimited and free, so a paused sandbox can sit indefinitely, but it is not running. One conflict to note: the billing docs' cost advice says the default is '2 vCPU, 512 MiB RAM' while the pricing page says 4 GiB; if 512 MiB is right the hour is USD 0.1089 and the credit buys 918 h, so the shape should be checked in the console before trusting either figure. |
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| Evidence note | documented Credit, rates, shape range, concurrency, the one-hour cap, the signup form and the no-payment-method block were each read on a first-party page and quoted. The one conflict is the default sandbox RAM, 4 GiB on the pricing page against 512 MiB in the billing docs' cost advice; the 4 GiB figure is used because it is the one the pricing page states as the default shape. |
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| Parsed numbers | - price USD 49.68 10 hours a day / month
- price USD 120.89 / month
- has-free-tier 1
- retention-clamped 1 hour
|
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