CloudGPU vs Salad: Pricing, Specs, Strengths & Weaknesses

Side-by-side comparison of GPU compute pricing, regions, billing models, and strengths for CloudGPU and Salad. Rates sourced from public APIs — verify current availability and billing terms before purchasing.

Overview

Attribute

CloudGPU

Salad

Provider type

Specialist

Marketplace

Founded

2018

Headquarters

Boston, MA

Billing model

On-demand (per-minute)

Per-second on-demand, Reserved contracts (Dedicated)

Min commitment

None

None (Community Cloud)

Support tier

Community

Community → Enterprise

Regions

1 regions

3 regions

Strengths & Best For

CloudGPU

CloudGPU rents on-demand GPUs billed per minute, with root SSH access and templates for Ollama, JupyterLab, ComfyUI and LLaMA-Factory. Prices come from CloudGPU's public price feed.

Strengths

Per-minute billing — pay only for what you use
Root SSH access on every instance
Ready-to-use templates: Ollama, JupyterLab, ComfyUI, LLaMA-Factory
Wide consumer and data-center GPU selection

Weaknesses

Smaller provider — limited scale vs hyperscalers
No enterprise SLAs or compliance certifications
Region information not published per instance

Best For

Developers wanting per-minute billing with no commitmentTeams running Ollama or ComfyUI workloadsCost-sensitive inference and fine-tuning

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CloudGPU Rating

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Salad

Salad orchestrates idle consumer GPUs from homes and small businesses worldwide into a single API-driven platform. GPU catalog: RTX 5090, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, RTX 4080, RTX 3090. Four priority tiers: High (never preempted), Medium, Low, Lowest (batch, cheapest). vCPU and RAM included with every GPU. Products: Community Cloud (lowest-cost distributed pool), Salad Dedicated (reserved RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell bare metal on contract), AI Gateway (OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoint), Transcription API, Private AI Cloud (run on your own idle GPUs). SOC 2 Type I. Trusted by Civitai (10M images/day).

Strengths

RTX 4090 (Lowest priority) — cheapest RTX 4090 inference anywhere
RTX 5090 (Lowest priority) — Blackwell at consumer prices
Four priority tiers: High/Medium/Low/Lowest — balance cost vs reliability
vCPU and RAM included with every GPU at no extra charge
Per-second billing, no cold-start charges, no minimums
Salad Dedicated: RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell bare metal on contract

Weaknesses

Consumer GPU network — not suitable for sub-10ms latency or NVLink multi-GPU training
No data-residency guarantees on Community Cloud
Interruptible nodes require fault-tolerant workload design

Best For

Batch image generation and video AI at lowest costLLM inference via AI GatewaySpeech-to-text transcription at scaleTeams wanting private cloud on their own idle hardware

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Salad Rating

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Live GPU Pricing

GPU Model

CloudGPU /hr

Salad /hr

RTX 3090

$0.29

$0.09

RTX 4090

$0.39

$0.16

A100 80GB

$1.59

$0.85

Green = lower price. On-demand hourly rates. Updated every 15 minutes.

Salad: Lowest priority tier — preemptible

Region Coverage

CloudGPU — 1 regions

Global

Salad — 3 regions

USEUGlobal (190+ countries)

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Provider pages

CloudGPU pricing and specs Salad pricing and specs

Key differences

CloudGPU

On-demand GPUs billed per minute — RTX 3090 to A100, root SSH, Ollama and ComfyUI templates

Salad

RTX 5090, RTX 4090 (Lowest priority) — distributed idle GPUs, per-second billing

AttributeCloudGPUSalad

Provider typespecialistmarketplace

Billing modelOn-demand (per-minute)Per-second on-demand, Reserved contracts (Dedicated)

Min commitmentNoneNone (Community Cloud)

Regions1 (Global)3 (US, EU, Global (190+ countries))

Support tierCommunityCommunity → Enterprise

Best forDevelopers wanting per-minute billing with no commitment, Teams running Ollama or ComfyUI workloadsBatch image generation and video AI at lowest cost, LLM inference via AI Gateway

Founded / HQ · 2018 · Boston, MA