Salad

Salad GPU pricing overview

Salad is a marketplace GPU cloud provider headquartered in Boston, MA. 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). Billing is Per-second on-demand, Reserved contracts (Dedicated) with a minimum commitment of None (Community Cloud). Available regions include US, EU, Global (190+ countries). GPU instances can be provisioned on-demand, making Salad suitable for both short-duration experiments and sustained production workloads.

Salad vs other GPU providers

Salad competes with providers including Lambda Labs, CoreWeave, RunPod, Paperspace, Vast.ai, and the major hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) for GPU compute workloads spanning LLM training, fine-tuning, and inference serving. Key differentiators include: 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. Use the side-by-side comparison tool above to see Salad pricing against any other provider across shared GPU models. For a broader market view, the live GPU prices table shows all 7 Salad listings alongside 91+ providers in a single sortable view.

Best use cases for Salad

Salad is best suited for: Batch image generation and video AI at lowest cost, LLM inference via AI Gateway, Speech-to-text transcription at scale, Teams wanting private cloud on their own idle hardware. Support tiers range from Community → Enterprise, making it viable for both individual researchers and enterprise teams with SLA requirements. There are currently 7 active GPU listings on Salad, covering RTX 3080, RTX 3090, RTX 4090, A40 and more. H100 SXM5 instances with NVLink interconnect are commonly used for large-scale training workloads. A100 40GB and RTX 4090 instances are frequently used for fine-tuning and inference of smaller models.

Salad billing model and cost structure

Salad uses Per-second on-demand, Reserved contracts (Dedicated) pricing. Spot pricing is not currently available on this provider — all instances are on-demand. Reserved instance pricing may be available for predictable long-running workloads — check the provider's pricing page for current committed-use rates. Always compare the effective hourly rate including egress, storage, and networking costs when evaluating total cost of ownership across providers.

Choosing the right GPU on Salad

GPU selection depends on model size, precision, and whether your workload is compute-bound or memory-bandwidth-bound. For LLM training above 30B parameters, H100 80GB SXM5 instances with NVLink are the standard choice — high HBM3 bandwidth and FP16 throughput make them well-suited for large transformer workloads. For inference of 7B–13B models in FP16 or BF16, A100 40GB is a common choice on many providers. RTX 4090 instances are widely used for fine-tuning, prototyping, and quantized inference (INT4/INT8) of models up to 70B. Read the H100 vs A100 guide or the GPU benchmarks for ML guide for a full breakdown.

How Salad pricing data is collected

Prices shown are sourced from Salad's public pricing API or pricing page and refreshed every 15 minutes. On-demand rates reflect the current list price for a single GPU instance in the cheapest available region. Spot prices, where available, reflect interruptible instance rates at the time of the last snapshot. All prices are in USD per hour. Daily snapshots are kept in our history archive and visualised in the GPU price history charts — useful for identifying seasonal pricing patterns and evaluating whether current rates are above or below the 30-day average.

Evaluating managed LLM inference APIs as an alternative to self-hosted GPU compute? Compare live LLM token prices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, and many other providers. The cheapest GPU cloud guide covers the break-even analysis between self-hosted and managed inference at different request volumes.