Price comparison
Vast.ai vs RunPod GPU prices
On the 6 cards both providers list, Vast.ai's median hourly price is typically 51% below RunPod's list price. Example: L4 24 GB costs $0.10/hr on Vast.ai versus $0.59/hr on RunPod — $358 less per month at 24/7, before the $19 orchestration fee.
The same cards, both providers
| GPU | VRAM | Vast from $/hr | Vast median $/hr | RunPod $/hr | Saving | Vast median $/mo | RunPod $/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L4 | 24 GB | $0.10 | $0.10 | $0.59 | 83% | $73 | $431 |
| RTX 4090 | 24 GB | $0.14 | $0.42 | $0.89 | 53% | $307 | $650 |
| RTX 3090 | 24 GB | $0.10 | $0.24 | $0.50 | 52% | $175 | $365 |
| RTX 5090 | 32 GB | $0.37 | $0.60 | $1.19 | 50% | $438 | $869 |
| RTX A6000 | 48 GB | $0.35 | $0.44 | $0.59 | 25% | $321 | $431 |
| RTX 6000 Ada | 48 GB | $0.74 | $0.74 | $0.99 | 25% | $540 | $723 |
Only cards with live whole-card offers on both sides are listed. A datacenter GPU that Vast.ai currently sells mostly as multi-GPU nodes or fractional slices (H100 SXM, L40S) can be missing from this table.
What a month actually costs
Vast.ai median price + the $19 Pro subscription, versus RunPod's list price. One GPU running 24/7 for an average month (730 hours).
Saves $412 per month
Saves $339 per month
Where RunPod is the better choice
- Contractual reliability: Secure Cloud comes with an SLA; Vast.ai is a marketplace and cheap hosts can be reclaimed.
- Predictable pricing: a fixed rate that does not move with host supply, which matters for budgeting long-lived workloads.
- Serverless: RunPod sells a separate per-request inference tier; CUDAnetes orchestrates always-on containers, not request-billed endpoints.
- Community Cloud is often cheaper than the list prices shown here — compare it if price is all that matters.
Where Vast.ai wins
- Lowest market price: per-second billing on a marketplace, typically well below fixed-price providers, especially on consumer cards.
- Breadth: dozens of GPU classes from RTX 3060 to B200, each at several VRAM sizes.
- No lock-in: the instances live in your own Vast.ai account; you can inspect them directly at any time.
What CUDAnetes adds
Raw Vast.ai gives you a machine and an IP. CUDAnetes gives you a deployment: it searches and rents the GPUs, checks your container's health every five seconds, replaces failed workers, scales the fleet with request load, spreads workers across distinct hosts, can move to cheaper offers, and serves everything behind one public HTTPS URL. A flat $19 per month (free plan available), no markup on GPU time.
Questions
Is Vast.ai cheaper than RunPod?
On the 6 cards both providers list, Vast.ai's median hourly price is typically 51% below RunPod's list price (RunPod checked 2026-11-02, Vast prices refreshed hourly). The gap is largest on consumer cards and smaller on datacenter GPUs, where RunPod's fixed price buys a service-level agreement.
Do I need a Vast.ai account to use CUDAnetes?
Yes. You bring your own Vast.ai API key and rent GPUs on your own Vast.ai account, so GPU billing comes from Vast.ai directly. CUDAnetes charges a flat subscription for orchestration and takes no markup on GPU time.
Is Vast.ai reliable enough for production?
Vast.ai is a marketplace, not a fixed-price cloud: hosts vary in reliability and cheap offers can disappear. CUDAnetes runs a health check every five seconds, replaces failed workers automatically, spreads a fleet across distinct hosts and keeps serving from the healthy ones. That is mitigation, not an SLA — if you need a contractual uptime guarantee on a fixed price, RunPod Secure Cloud is the safer choice.
What does CUDAnetes add on top of Vast.ai?
Provisioning and machine selection, health checks with automatic replacement, auto-scaling by request load, load balancing across healthy workers, optional scheduled windows, a cost optimizer that moves to cheaper offers, and one public HTTPS URL per deployment. The subscription is $19 per month for Pro; the free plan covers one deployment with up to five GPUs.
Why do the two price columns differ in granularity?
Both providers bill per second. The monthly figures are hourly rate × 730 (an average month) assuming the instance runs 24/7, so the comparison is like-for-like; your real bill depends on runtime.
Try the cheaper half of this table
Deploy any Docker container on Vast.ai GPUs and get one URL: free plan with 1 deployment and 5 GPUs, no card required. See the full live index at GPU prices on Vast.ai.
Start free →RunPod prices captured from runpod.io/pricing on 2026-11-02 (Pods, on-demand list price; storage and egress excluded). Vast.ai prices are live marketplace medians, not a quote.