Vast.ai

Vast.ai GPU pricing overview

Vast.ai is a marketplace GPU cloud provider headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Vast.ai is a peer-to-peer GPU marketplace listing 10,000+ GPUs — including H100, A100, and RTX 4090 — from hosts worldwide, consistently offering some of the lowest spot GPU rental prices available anywhere. Both on-demand and bid-based spot pricing are available, enabling researchers and developers to run LLM fine-tuning, image generation, and batch AI workloads at a fraction of traditional cloud costs. The largest and most price-competitive GPU marketplace for budget-conscious AI teams. Billing is On-demand, Spot (bid-based) with a minimum commitment of None. Available regions include US, EU, APAC, Various. On-demand GPU instances can be provisioned in minutes with no upfront cost, making Vast.ai suitable for both short-duration experiments and sustained production workloads.

Vast.ai vs other GPU providers

Vast.ai 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: Lowest spot prices; Wide GPU variety; Bid-based pricing. Use the side-by-side comparison tool above to see Vast.ai pricing against any other provider across shared GPU models. For a broader market view, the live GPU prices table shows all 5 Vast.ai listings alongside 94+ providers in a single sortable view.

Best use cases for Vast.ai

Vast.ai is best suited for: Budget-conscious developers, Spot-tolerant batch jobs, Researchers needing cheap GPUs. Support tiers range from Community → Pro, making it viable for both individual researchers and enterprise teams with SLA requirements. There are currently 5 active GPU listings on Vast.ai, covering RTX 4090, RTX 3090, A100 80GB, H100 80GB and more. For workloads requiring the highest single-GPU throughput, H100 SXM5 instances with NVLink interconnect deliver the best performance per dollar at scale. For cost-sensitive fine-tuning or inference of models up to 13B parameters, A100 40GB or RTX 4090 instances typically offer the best value.

Vast.ai billing model and cost structure

Vast.ai uses On-demand, Spot (bid-based) pricing. On-demand instances are billed per second or per hour depending on the instance type, with no termination fees. Spot (interruptible) instances are available from $0.09/hr — typically 40–70% cheaper than on-demand rates, suitable for fault-tolerant training jobs with checkpointing. Reserved instance pricing, where available, can reduce costs by 30–60% for predictable long-running workloads. 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 Vast.ai

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 — the 3,350 GB/s HBM3 bandwidth and 989 TFLOPS FP16 throughput make them 2–2.5× faster than A100 for transformer workloads. For inference of 7B–13B models in FP16 or BF16, A100 40GB offers the best cost-per-token on most providers. RTX 4090 instances are ideal 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 Vast.ai pricing data is collected

Prices shown are sourced from Vast.ai'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 retained for 90 days 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 14+ other providers. The cheapest GPU cloud guide covers the break-even analysis between self-hosted and managed inference at different request volumes.