Collimate vs Shellbox

Collimate costs $0.04 per vCPU-hour and Shellbox costs $0.01 per vCPU-hour. Collimate runs Firecracker microVMs and limits a session to 24 hours. Shellbox runs Firecracker microVMs and has no session limit.

Updated

Collimate

Isolation
Firecracker microVM
Free tier
Demo key, free with no card
Max session
24 hours

Shellbox

Isolation
Firecracker microVM
Free tier
Not listed
Max session
No limit

What is different

7 fields differ. The rest are the same or not listed.

Collimate
Shellbox
vCPU, per hour
Collimate: $0.04
Shellbox: $0.01
RAM, per GiB-hour
Collimate: $0.012
Shellbox: Included
Storage
Collimate: $0.10 per GB-month while a sandbox is suspended
Shellbox: A stopped box costs $0.50 per x1 slot per month
Billing
Collimate: Per second
Shellbox: Bundled machine time
Max session
Collimate: 24 hours
Shellbox: No limit
Concurrent sandboxes
Collimate: Up to 100
Shellbox: Up to 16
Integrations
Collimate: MCP, Claude Code
Shellbox: Claude Code

Full comparison

18 fields, at each provider's list price

Pricing

vCPU, per hour
Collimate: $0.04
Shellbox: $0.01
RAM, per GiB-hour
Collimate: $0.012
Shellbox: Included
Storage
Collimate: $0.10 per GB-month while a sandbox is suspended
Shellbox: A stopped box costs $0.50 per x1 slot per month
Free tier
Collimate: Demo key, free with no card
Shellbox: Not listed
Paid plan from
Collimate: Pay as you go
Shellbox: Pay as you go
Billing
Collimate: Per second
Shellbox: Bundled machine time

Limits

Max session
Collimate: 24 hours
Shellbox: No limit
Idle stop
Collimate: Not listed
Shellbox: After 2 minutes
Largest sandbox
Collimate: Not listed
Shellbox: 16 vCPU · 32 GiB
Concurrent sandboxes
Collimate: Up to 100
Shellbox: Up to 16

Platform

Isolation
Collimate: Firecracker microVM
Shellbox: Firecracker microVM
GPU
Collimate: Not listed
Shellbox: Not listed
Snapshots
Collimate:
Shellbox:
Pause and resume
Collimate:
Shellbox:

Developer

SDKs
Collimate: Python
Shellbox: Not listed
Integrations
Collimate: MCP, Claude Code
Shellbox: Claude Code

Trust

License
Collimate: Not listed
Shellbox: Not listed
BYOC
Collimate: Enterprise plan
Shellbox: Not listed

Hourly cost

One sandbox running for one hour

Collimate
Shellbox
1 vCPU · 2 GiB
Collimate: $0.064
Shellbox: $0.010
2 vCPU · 4 GiB
Collimate: $0.128
Shellbox: $0.020
4 vCPU · 8 GiB
Collimate: $0.256
Shellbox: $0.040

Compute only, at list rates.

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Which one fits

Based on the fields above

Collimate fits when

  • You use MCP.
  • You need the sandboxes in your own cloud account.

Shellbox fits when

  • A session must run longer than 24 hours.
  • You want the lower list price: $0.020 against $0.128 an hour for 2 vCPU and 4 GiB.

More comparisons

See all comparisons

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