Leafcloud vs Salad: Pricing, Specs, Strengths & Weaknesses

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

Overview

Attribute

Leafcloud

Salad

Provider type

Specialist

Marketplace

Founded

2019

2018

Headquarters

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Boston, MA

Billing model

On-demand

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

Min commitment

None

None (Community Cloud)

Support tier

Standard

Community → Enterprise

Regions

2 regions

3 regions

Strengths & Best For

Leafcloud

Leafcloud is a Dutch sustainable cloud provider that reuses server waste heat to warm buildings, offering GPU compute with 100% renewable energy and GDPR-compliant EU data residency for environmentally conscious AI teams. On-demand billing and a strong sustainability mission make it one of the most genuinely green GPU cloud options in Europe. A top choice for Dutch and EU-based organizations that want to minimize the environmental impact of their AI training and inference workloads.

Strengths

Waste heat reuse
Sustainable compute
GDPR compliant
Dutch presence

Weaknesses

Very small GPU catalog
Limited to European regions
Not ML-focused — limited AI tooling

Best For

Sustainability-focused teamsEuropean AI workloadsGDPR-sensitive data

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Leafcloud 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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