Upstash launches Box — agent sandboxes billed per active CPU hour
Upstash Box adds a sixth product line: sandboxed computers for AI agents priced at $0.10 per active CPU hour, Upstash's first compute-metered SKU alongside its five data products.
Five products (Redis, Vector, QStash, Workflow, Search), all metered per request, message or step.
Six products; Box adds active-CPU-hour metering ($0.10 Small / $0.20 Medium / $0.40 Large per active CPU hour) plus flat Keep-Alive pricing at $8 / $16 / $32 per month.
Upstash Box is a sandboxed computer for AI agents — filesystem, shell and Git inside a box an agent can drive. Commercially it matters because it is Upstash’s first product metered on compute rather than on data operations: billing is per active CPU hour, so a box that is idle costs nothing and freezes automatically, mirroring the scale-to-zero logic Upstash applied to Redis in 2021. Upstash’s own worked example: “using 100% of 2 cores for one hour costs $0.2, while using 10% of a single core for one hour costs $0.01.”
The free tier is 10 concurrent boxes and 5 CPU hours per month, with a $1/month cap on Upstash-provided LLM tokens for the built-in agent (raised to $100/month on Pay as You Go). Storage is $0.10 per GB per month.
In June 2026 Upstash added Keep-Alive boxes, an always-on mode billed at a flat $8 (Small), $16 (Medium) or $32 (Large) per month — a fixed price that replaces both CPU and storage billing on that box. The pricing page still carries the banner “Upstash Box is in Developer Preview! APIs and pricing may change.”
Upstash Box, a sandboxed computer for AI agents, launches in Developer Preview at $0.10 per active CPU hour with a $0 free tier (10 concurrent boxes, 5 CPU hours/month) — Upstash's first compute-metered product alongside its five data products. (upstash.com/blog/upstash-box)