Piston by Engineer Man
Self-host a high-performance engine that executes code in many languages via an HTTP API.
Code sandboxes Open source
Price
Free (open source)
you pay only for the compute it runs on
Free tier
Open source
SDK downloads
—
no official SDK package
Status
—
no public status page
Pricing
| Free tier | — |
|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | — |
| Usage price | — |
| Good to know | MIT-licensed, self-hosted. The public emkc.org Piston API is no longer freely available since Feb 15, 2026; keys are granted only for non-commercial educational projects. |
Open source: free to run on your own hardware; you pay only for the compute. Checked
Use it from an agent
| MCP server | None found |
|---|
Alternatives to Piston
| API | Free | Price | SDK downloads / wk | GitHub stars | MCP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Modal Sandboxes Serverless isolated containers for coding agents and untrusted code, with GPUs available. |
Starter: $30/month of free compute, no monthly fee | Free plan · paid from $250/mo | 11.5M | 522 | MCP (community) |
| Vercel Sandbox Ephemeral Linux microVMs on Vercel for running untrusted or AI-generated code. |
Hobby: 5 active-CPU hours, 420 GB-hours... | Free plan · paid from $20/mo | 6.3M | 210 | MCP |
| E2B Secure cloud sandboxes (microVMs) where agents run code, start in under a second. |
Hobby: $100 one-time usage credit, sessions... | Free plan · paid from $150/mo | 3.4M | 14.3K | MCP |
| Daytona Fast-starting sandboxes (CPU, GPU, Windows) for running AI-generated code, billed per second. |
$200 in free compute, no credit card | Free plan then vCPU $0.0504/hour; memory $0.0162 per GiB-hour; storage... |
2.3M | 71.6K | MCP |
| CodeSandbox SDK Programmatic microVM sandboxes with snapshot/fork, for running agent and user code. |
Build plan: free, 10 concurrent VMs... | Free plan · paid from $170/mo | 119K | 112 | |
| Riza Code Interpreter API that runs untrusted Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby and PHP in WebAssembly isolation. |
Hobby: up to 100,000 requests/month,... | Free plan · paid from $250/mo | 3,874 | 5 | MCP |