$ k8scalc compare runpod vast.ai
RunPod vs Vast.ai
RunPod vs Vast.ai — GPU rental marketplace comparison. Vast.ai offers lower spot prices but variable reliability; RunPod offers higher consistency. Which is right for your LLM workload?
FeatureRunPodVast.ai
RTX 4090 price
~$0.44/hr (on-demand)
~$0.25–0.35/hr (spot)
A100 80 GB price
~$1.99/hr
~$0.67–1.50/hr (spot)
Infrastructure
RunPod-owned + community
Community hosts only
Uptime guarantee
Yes (RunPod-owned)
No
On-demand instances
Yes
Spot-first
GPU variety
Good
Excellent
Lowest prices
No
Yes
UI / developer experience
Polished
Functional
API & templates
Good library
Moderate
Storage persistence
Network volumes
Host-dependent
Verdict
Vast.ai wins on price — RTX 4090 spot instances average $0.35–0.40/hr vs RunPod's $0.44/hr on-demand. The tradeoff: Vast.ai is a peer-to-peer marketplace where hosts are community members, not data centers. This means variable reliability, occasional unexpected interruptions, and inconsistent storage. RunPod-owned instances are more reliable with guaranteed specs. Use Vast.ai for batch jobs with checkpointing where interruption is acceptable. Use RunPod for inference serving or interactive development.