Vast.ai
Peer-to-peer GPU marketplace — often the cheapest GPU rental anywhere.
About
Vast.ai is a marketplace where independent data centers and individuals rent out spare GPU capacity, making it frequently the cheapest way to rent GPUs on the open market. Hosts set their own prices and reliability varies by host, so you filter by GPU type, price, and reliability score (99%+ recommended) and pick per-second-billed instances in on-demand or cheaper interruptible tiers.
Pricing floats with supply and demand — H100 SXM listings have been seen around $1.50–2.80/hr with promotions as low as $1.49, RTX 4090s around $0.25–0.50/hr — and 30+ GPU models are listed, with Docker-image deployment, a CLI (vastai), and an API for automation. Serving a reported 200,000 daily users since 2018 with SOC2 platform certification, it is legitimate infrastructure, not a sketchy side project. The honest caveat is the marketplace trade-off: host-variable reliability, no provider-level SLAs, and separate storage/bandwidth charges — best for cost-sensitive training, batch inference, and experimentation, not for production serving with uptime guarantees.
What it can do
- Peer-to-peer GPU marketplace with 30+ GPU models
- Per-second billing, on-demand and interruptible tiers
- Host reliability scores and DLPerf benchmarks
- CLI and API for automated provisioning
- Often the floor price for H100/A100/4090 rentals
Setup
Sign up at cloud.vast.ai, add credit ($5–10 minimum), pick a host and Docker image, click Rent — or use the vastai CLI.
Prerequisites
An account with credit; Docker image for your workload.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 77; Trending score 82/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.