Layer 2.5 · head to head
Spheron vs Vast.ai
Spot B200 access against the deepest consumer marketplace.
| Spheron | Vast.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Can you leave | Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking. | Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking. |
| Counterparty | Marketplace risk — assume interruption. | You are renting from individuals and small operators. Assume any single machine disappears without notice and design for it. |
| What it is | Brokers capacity somebody else owns. Cheapest headline rates, and the machine you get is not the machine you chose. | 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. | You push a container image and it runs. No cluster to operate. |
| Accelerators | B200, H100, A100 and consumer parts | Whatever the market is offering — RTX 5090, 4090, PRO 6000, V100, H100 and a long tail |
| Regions | Distributed | Global, wherever a host has hardware |
| Pricing model | On-demand and spot, with aggressive spot pricing. | Open bidding marketplace, interruptible and on-demand. The clearing price is public without an account. |
| Getting started | Low. | Cents. |
| Capacity | Variable, marketplace-dependent. | Deep on consumer silicon, thin and volatile on datacentre parts. |
| Ownership | Private. | Private. |
Spheron
For: Interruptible batch work at the lowest possible price.
The catch: Spot means spot. Reported B200 spot around $2.12/hr against $5-6 on-demand elsewhere, and the difference is exactly the interruption risk you are accepting.
Economics: The cheapest B200 access reported in 2026 surveys, on spot terms. Excellent for checkpointable training, wrong for serving.
Vast.ai
For: Price-sensitive batch work, research, and anyone benchmarking what compute *should* cost before signing a contract.
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.
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.
Neither table row is a price
Deliberately. Published on-demand rates at this layer move weekly, and essentially nobody signing a real contract pays them — every serious buyer pays less than every list figure either of these companies publishes. Quoting one here would date this page within a month.
The GPU rental price index carries dated, sourced figures instead, and the durable finding there is the spread: the identical H100 rents from roughly $1.38 to $12.29 an hour depending only on who you rent it from.
The layers underneath both
Whichever you pick is renting you chips in a building that needs power. In 2026 that is the constraint that binds: Microsoft has disclosed an Azure backlog it cannot fill for want of megawatts rather than accelerators, and the US interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with roughly 80% of projects withdrawing before they energise.
Layer 2 — Silicon · Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue