Vast.ai is usually the cheaper of the two: an RTX 4090 started at $0.31 an hour on demand there in September 2026, against $0.34 on RunPod Community Cloud and $0.74 on RunPod Secure Cloud. RunPod is the simpler product: fixed list prices, free data transfer, and network volumes that let your files outlive any single machine. Pick Vast.ai when price matters most and your job survives a host going away; pick RunPod when you want fewer decisions and storage that isn’t tied to one box.
Everything below comes from the two companies’ docs and pricing pages, plus getdeploying.com for Vast.ai’s marketplace prices, all checked in September 2026. Prices move weekly, so treat them as a snapshot.
At a glance
| RunPod | Vast.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | One company: Secure Cloud (data centers) and Community Cloud (vetted peer hosts) | Marketplace: hosts from home rigs to certified data centers |
| Who sets prices | RunPod, fixed list | Each host |
| Billing | Per second; 1 hour of credit needed to start | Per second |
| RTX 4090, per hour | $0.34 Community, $0.74 Secure | From $0.31 on demand, $0.21 interruptible |
| Cheaper tiers | Spot (interruptible) pods, 3 or 6 month savings plans | Interruptible (bid), reserved up to 50% off |
| Stopped storage | $0.20/GB/month volume disk | Host’s rate, until you destroy it |
| Storage that moves | Network volumes, $0.07/GB/month | Volumes are tied to one machine |
| Data transfer | Free in and out | Host’s rate, per byte |
| Serverless | Flex and active workers | Serverless at instance prices |
| Payment | Card, crypto (after KYC), invoice over $5,000 | Card, BitPay, Crypto.com; $5 minimum |
The rest of the post explains where those rows come from and where they bite.
Two different kinds of company
RunPod runs two pools. Secure Cloud, in its own words, “operates in T3/T4 data centers” and is aimed at production and sensitive data. Community Cloud “connects individual compute providers to users through a vetted, secure peer-to-peer system”. One detail has changed this year: RunPod’s docs now say it “is no longer accepting new hosts for Community Cloud”, though existing Community capacity stays available. So the cheap RunPod tier is a fixed pool, and popular cards there are often sold out.
Vast.ai is a marketplace. Hosts list machines, set their own prices, and you rent a Docker container (or a VM) on one of them. Machines come in three grades: unverified (new), verified (passed Vast’s own tests), and datacenter. A datacenter host has to hold ISO/IEC 27001 or a Tier 2/3 rating, sign a hosting agreement, prove who owns the business and list at least five GPU servers. Those offers carry a blue label and make up what Vast calls its “Secure Cloud”.
Both companies use the words “Secure Cloud” for their data-center tier. They mean similar things, but the vetting is different, so read each company’s definition before you promise anything to a compliance team.
Practically, both give you a container with SSH and Jupyter. RunPod adds VS Code and Cursor connections and a web proxy for exposing ports. The day-to-day work (pull an image, mount storage, run your script) is the same on both.
Prices for common cards
Per GPU per hour, on demand unless stated, September 2026:
| GPU | Vast.ai | RunPod Community | RunPod Secure |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 3090 | $0.13 on demand, $0.08 interruptible | $0.22 | $0.50 |
| RTX 4090 | $0.31 on demand, $0.21 interruptible | $0.34 | $0.74 |
Vast.ai prices are the lowest offers getdeploying.com listed on September 30, 2026. The $0.13 RTX 3090 price was for an 8-GPU machine and the $0.21 RTX 4090 interruptible price for a 4-GPU machine in Canada, both per GPU. Single-GPU offers are sometimes a little higher. RunPod prices are from its pricing page and getdeploying.com. For bigger cards, RunPod’s Secure Cloud list shows the RTX 5090 at $0.99, the A100 80 GB at $1.59 and the H100 SXM at $3.49 an hour.
RunPod raised 11 Secure Cloud prices on September 20, 2026. The RTX 4090 went from $0.69 to $0.74, A100s from $1.39 to $1.59 and the H100 SXM from $2.99 to $3.49. The RTX 3090 and RTX 5090 didn’t change, and no Community Cloud price changed.
A worked example
Ten hours of fine-tuning on one RTX 4090:
- Vast.ai on demand: 10 × $0.31 = $3.10, plus whatever the host charges for the bytes you move.
- Vast.ai interruptible: 10 × $0.21 = $2.10, if nobody outbids you. If they do, you lose the time since your last checkpoint.
- RunPod Community: 10 × $0.34 = $3.40, if a card is free.
- RunPod Secure: 10 × $0.74 = $7.40.
On a single job the gap is a few dollars. On a month of continuous use (730 hours) it’s $226 on Vast.ai on demand against $540 on RunPod Secure. That’s the number to look at if you’re choosing a home for a long-running workload.
Interruptible and spot
Both sell cheaper capacity that can be taken away.
On Vast.ai you set a bid. An interruptible instance “can be stopped by higher bids”, and when that happens “your instance is stopped (killing running processes)”. Vast says interruptible is often 50% or more below on demand. On-demand instances are the opposite: a fixed price set by the host that “cannot be interrupted”.
RunPod calls these interruptible or spot pods. Its API describes them as pods that “can be rented at a lower cost but can be stopped at any time to free up resources for another Pod”. RunPod’s own blog gives an example of an RTX A6000 at $0.232 spot against $0.491 on demand.
Either way the rule is the same: use it only for jobs that save checkpoints often and can resume on another machine.
Commitments
RunPod sells savings plans: pay 3 or 6 months up front for a discount on GPU compute. They’re non-refundable, have a fixed end date, and don’t cover storage. Vast.ai sells reserved instances with discounts of up to 50%, depending on how long you commit. On Vast, a reservation is with one host’s machine, so check that host’s reliability before you prepay.
Reliability: data centers vs a host marketplace
This is where the two differ most, and where the price gap comes from.
On RunPod Secure Cloud you rent from a company that controls the hardware and the facility. On-demand pods, per RunPod’s pricing docs, are dedicated to you “and cannot be displaced by other users”. Community Cloud is peer hosts with “variable” reliability, in RunPod’s own comparison table.
On Vast.ai you rent from whoever listed the machine. Vast gives you tools to judge them:
- Reliability score. “A measure of the machine’s historical uptime and health. All machines start at 60%.” A score in the high 90s means a long, clean record.
- Verified vs unverified. Unverified machines are new and untested.
- Datacenter label. Certified facilities, recommended by Vast for production.
- Maximum duration. Every offer shows how long the host will rent it out. An offer “remains available … until it reaches its end date or is unlisted by the host”, so a machine you like may not be there next month.
My rule after years of renting from marketplaces: filter by reliability first and price second, and never keep the only copy of anything on a host’s disk. A $0.25 machine that disappears mid-run costs more than a $0.35 one that doesn’t.
One RunPod trap is worth knowing. When you restart a stopped pod, RunPod warns you “may be allocated zero GPUs if capacity has changed”. Your files are still there, but the GPU on that machine may be rented to someone else. That’s the reason network volumes exist.
Storage and what stopping costs
Storage is where the hourly price stops telling the whole story. It keeps billing when the GPU doesn’t.
RunPod
| Storage | While running | While stopped |
|---|---|---|
| Container disk | $0.10/GB/month | Not charged (and wiped) |
| Volume disk (/workspace) | $0.10/GB/month | $0.20/GB/month |
| Network volume, under 1 TB | $0.07/GB/month | $0.07/GB/month |
| Network volume, over 1 TB | $0.05/GB/month | $0.05/GB/month |
Container and volume disk are billed per second; network volumes are billed hourly. The container disk is scratch space and is cleared when the pod stops. The volume disk survives a stop but is deleted on terminate. A network volume is independent of any pod and can be attached to a new one, which solves the “zero GPUs on restart” problem: stop, start a fresh pod elsewhere, attach the same volume.
Worked example: you keep 100 GB of models and checkpoints between sessions. On a stopped pod’s volume disk that’s 100 × $0.20 = $20 a month. On a network volume it’s 100 × $0.07 = $7 a month, and you aren’t tied to one machine. Data transfer is free both ways.
Vast.ai
Vast has container storage, deleted with the instance, and local volumes. Two rules shape how you use it:
- Disk size is fixed at creation. You can’t resize it later, so pick generously the first time.
- Volumes are tied to one physical machine. They “cannot be moved or attached to instances on other machines”.
Storage prices vary by host and show on each offer (hover over the Rent button). They’re billed for as long as the instance exists: “Storage charges continue even when instances are stopped. To stop storage billing, you must destroy the instance completely.” Vast does note you’re never charged while a machine is offline.
Bandwidth is also priced by the host, per byte, in both directions. Downloading a 16 GB model and uploading a few checkpoints is small money on most hosts, but check the rate before you move a large dataset. RunPod doesn’t charge for this at all.
For a longer list of what the hourly price leaves out on every platform, see the real cost of renting a GPU.
Templates and setup
Both use Docker images and call their presets “templates”.
RunPod’s templates are “pre-configured Docker image setups that let you quickly spin up Pods without manual environment configuration”: PyTorch, ComfyUI, inference servers and many community ones. You pick one, choose a GPU, and you’re in JupyterLab or SSH within minutes.
Vast.ai has the same idea. Its quickstart points you to pre-built templates such as PyTorch, TensorFlow and ComfyUI, or your own. Setup has a few more steps: verify your email before renting, upload an SSH public key, and install Vast’s certificate for Jupyter in the browser.
Since you can bring any image to both, templates matter less after your first week. The larger practical difference is that on RunPod your environment can live on a network volume and follow you, while on Vast.ai you either rebuild on each new machine or bake everything into your image.
Serverless
Both run your container as an autoscaling endpoint, and they bill it differently.
RunPod Serverless has flex workers, which scale to zero when idle, and active workers, which run all the time at a discount (arranged through sales). You pay for three phases: start time (loading the container and the model into GPU memory), execution time, and an idle timeout after each request, 5 seconds by default. The pricing page listed the RTX 4090 tier (24 GB PRO) at $1.10 an hour, noticeably more than a $0.74 Secure Cloud pod. You’re paying for not having to run anything while traffic is zero.
Vast.ai Serverless charges “at the same price as Vast.ai’s non-Serverless GPU instances”, per second, with no extra fee. Active and loading workers pay for GPU, storage and bandwidth. Inactive workers pay only storage and bandwidth. Creating workers don’t pay GPU time.
If your traffic is spiky and you’ll accept cold starts, both work. RunPod has more polish and examples. Vast.ai is cheaper per GPU second but runs on the same mixed pool of hosts.
If all you need is to call an open model over an OpenAI-style API, you may not need either. Hosted per-token APIs are often cheapest for popular models (the math). GPUFlow is another option: you rent an OpenAI-compatible API key for a model that a provider runs with Ollama on their own GPU, billed per second. It’s inference only, with no SSH, no training and no custom code, so it doesn’t replace RunPod or Vast.ai for anything else. The three are compared in GPUFlow vs Vast.ai vs RunPod.
Payments, minimums and running out of credit
Both are prepaid, and both are harsh when the balance hits zero.
RunPod takes cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex and others through Stripe), crypto (complete KYC before your first crypto payment), and invoicing by ACH, wire or card for orders over $5,000. To deploy a pod you need at least one hour of credit for the configuration you chose. Credits are non-refundable and can’t be withdrawn. When you run out, pods with a network volume are stopped and the volume is kept (and keeps billing). Pods without one “are terminated, and their data can’t be recovered.”
Vast.ai takes cards through Stripe and crypto through BitPay and Crypto.com. The minimum deposit is $5, and you verify your email first. Auto-billing tops you up from a saved card when your balance drops below a threshold you set. At $0.00 your instances stop. With a saved card, Vast charges it to cover the negative balance. Without one, “instances and stored data will be destroyed”. Storage keeps billing even while your balance is negative. Refunds: none on credits you’ve spent. For unspent card credits you ask support, and crypto top-ups can’t be refunded.
The practical advice is the same for both: turn on auto top-up or keep a buffer, and keep anything you can’t lose on a network volume or off the platform.
Which one to pick
Pick Vast.ai when:
- Price per GPU hour is what you’re optimizing, especially for long runs where the monthly gap reaches hundreds of dollars.
- Your job checkpoints and can restart on a different machine. Then interruptible instances are the cheapest GPU time you’ll find.
- You’re willing to spend five minutes reading a host’s reliability score, location and maximum rental duration before you click Rent.
- You want serverless without paying a premium over the instance price.
Pick RunPod when:
- You want a fixed price list and don’t want to compare hosts.
- Your data needs to outlive any single machine. Network volumes at $0.07/GB/month are the cleanest answer either platform has.
- You move a lot of data in or out. RunPod doesn’t charge for it.
- You need a data-center tier, crypto with KYC, or invoicing for large orders from one vendor.
Use both if you can. Plenty of people keep a RunPod network volume as their home base and send long, checkpointed training runs to cheap Vast.ai machines. Moving a Docker image between them is trivial. Moving data is the part to plan for.
If you’re still working out what a rental needs (image, storage, SSH keys), start with what you need to rent a GPU, and compare wider prices in the 2026 GPU rental pricing comparison.
Sources
All checked in September 2026.
- RunPod: pricing page, pod pricing and storage, pods overview, choosing a pod, managing pods, create pod API (interruptible field), serverless pricing, billing, spot vs on-demand
- RunPod Secure Cloud price change of September 20, 2026: usagepricing.com
- Vast.ai: quickstart, pricing, rental types, finding and renting instances, datacenter status, storage types, volumes, serverless pricing, billing
- Marketplace prices: getdeploying.com for RTX 4090 and RTX 3090
- GPUFlow: renter getting started, API quickstart