marketplace · container · Layer 2.5
Salad
Massively parallel, interruption-tolerant, non-sensitive batch work. Image generation at volume is the canonical fit.
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
- Consumer GPUs only — RTX 3000/4000/5000 series
- Regions
- Distributed consumer machines
- Pricing model
- Per hour, extremely low, interruptible by design.
- Getting started
- Very low.
- Capacity
- Large in aggregate, individually unreliable.
- Ownership
- Private.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
Your workload runs on gaming PCs belonging to members of the public. This is stated plainly by them and should be stated plainly by you to your security reviewer.
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
No datacentre GPUs, no compliance story, no guarantees. For the right workload none of that matters and the price is unbeatable.
The economics
The lowest cost per unit of consumer-GPU work available anywhere, by a wide margin.
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
- Vast.ai vs Salad — Two floors of the market — datacentre castoffs against gaming PCs.Compare with Vast.ai
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- CUDO Compute — marketplace, medium portability