marketplace · container · Layer 2.5
Vast.ai
Price-sensitive batch work, research, and anyone benchmarking what compute *should* cost before signing a contract.
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
- Whatever the market is offering — RTX 5090, 4090, PRO 6000, V100, H100 and a long tail
- Regions
- Global, wherever a host has hardware
- Pricing model
- Open bidding marketplace, interruptible and on-demand. The clearing price is public without an account.
- Getting started
- Cents.
- Capacity
- Deep on consumer silicon, thin and volatile on datacentre parts.
- Ownership
- Private.
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The counterparty
You are renting from individuals and small operators. Assume any single machine disappears without notice and design for it.
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
Reliability is the price of the price. Hosts vary enormously, verification tiers matter, and a cheap unverified box that dies at hour nine is not cheap.
The economics
Consistently the market floor — reported around $1.49/hr for an H100 where hyperscalers ask $7. Its public API is the closest thing this market has to a spot index, which is why this site measures it.
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
- RunPod vs Vast.ai — Curated marketplace against open bidding: the price gap is the reliability gap.Compare with RunPod
- Vast.ai vs Salad — Two floors of the market — datacentre castoffs against gaming PCs.Compare with Salad
- Spheron vs Vast.ai — Spot B200 access against the deepest consumer marketplace.Compare with Spheron
Related providers
- Akash Network — marketplace, medium portability
- io.net — marketplace, medium portability
- RunPod — marketplace, medium portability
- Salad — marketplace, medium portability
- Spheron — marketplace, medium portability
- CUDO Compute — marketplace, medium portability