marketplace · container · Layer 2.5
io.net
Price-driven batch work by teams comfortable with the model.
medium portability Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking.
What you are buying
- Business model
- Brokers capacity somebody else owns. Cheapest headline rates, and the machine you get is not the machine you chose.
- How you reach it
- You push a container image and it runs. No cluster to operate.
- Accelerators
- Aggregated consumer and datacentre GPUs
- Regions
- Distributed
- Pricing model
- Marketplace, crypto-settled options.
- Getting started
- Low.
- Capacity
- Aggregated, volatile.
- Ownership
- Private, token-linked.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
Token-incentivised supply behaves differently from contracted supply. Capacity can appear and vanish with the incentive schedule rather than with demand.
A multi-year GPU commitment is a credit decision wearing a cloud contract. This is the section no benchmark covers and the one that decides what happens to your workload in 2028.
The catch
The token layer is a real variable in your supply, not a payment detail.
The economics
Can be very cheap. Model the supply risk, not just the rate.
No rate is quoted on this page on purpose. Published list prices at this layer move weekly and essentially nobody signing a real contract pays them. Dated, sourced figures live in the GPU rental price index, where the spread between the cheapest and dearest seller of the identical chip runs to roughly 9x.
The layers underneath this one
Whatever you rent here is a chip in a building that needs power. In 2026 megawatts, not silicon, are the binding constraint on the whole industry — a frontier rack draws 120–200 kW against a 2026 average near 27 kW, and the US interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW.
Layer 2 — Silicon · Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue · Tokens per watt
Compared against
- Akash Network vs io.net — Two decentralised models, and what token incentives do to your supply.Compare with Akash Network
Related providers
- Akash Network — marketplace, medium portability
- RunPod — marketplace, medium portability
- Salad — marketplace, medium portability
- Spheron — marketplace, medium portability
- Vast.ai — marketplace, medium portability
- CUDO Compute — marketplace, medium portability