Cheapest GPU clouds for AI workloads (2026)
Cheap doesn't mean cheap. A $1.80/hr H100 at 70% reliability costs more in re-runs than a $2.39/hr H100 at 95%. The picks below show the absolute floor, the most reliable budget option, and the ones to actively avoid despite their brand recognition.
Live pricing + 30-day reliability update on every page load. Curation refreshed manually.
Vast · 1× RTX 4090
Marketplace floor pricing on consumer 24 GB. 93% availability coverage in our window. Free egress. Best $/hr for jobs that tolerate preemption and fit in 24-48 GB VRAM.
Runpod · 1× RTX 4090
Community Cloud spot pricing exposed in our data. Free egress. Recover-from-checkpoint patterns documented widely. Less marketplace chaos than Vast — somewhat curated set of community providers.
PrimeIntellect · 1× H100
Marketplace-style but with curation, decent reliability scores in our 30-day data, paginated API works. Free egress. Skip the marketplace floor (Hyperbolic at $1.29 — currently API-broken; Vast at $1.80 — variable hosts) if reliability matters.
Avoid: Google Cloud (H100)
GCP H100 in europe-west4 is $13.57/hr vs $4.96 in us-central1 — same hardware, 2.7× regional markup. Plus GCP egress $0.12/GB (worst tier). A 100h run with 1 TB egress: $1,477 vs Runpod $239 = 6.2× total cost swing. Same trap on AWS and Azure: pick a US region or use a neocloud.
The caveat we wish more pages mentioned
Budget tier marketplaces (Vast, Shadeform, PrimeIntellect) have variable host quality. A $1.80/hr H100 at 70% reliability costs more in re-runs than a $2.39/hr H100 at 95%. Use our reliability score next to price as a tie-breaker — `effective $/hr = list ÷ reliability%` is the FinOps-correct comparison. Free credits stack: Lambda + Nebius + Vultr + Vast typically nets 50-100 free H100-hours for prototyping before any payment.
Data we don't yet show — and how it might change the call
- Spot pre-emption rate per provider/region — AWS publishes interruption frequencies; most neoclouds don't
- Free credit programs — most providers offer trial credits but we don't aggregate them
- Regional currency arbitrage — AceCloud and Yotta price in INR; FX swings 3-8% never reflected in our USD column
Honesty about gaps beats false confidence. We add data as it becomes structurally available.