26 articles · newest first
Should a 10–50 person company buy a GPU server, rent one by the hour, or just pay per token? The three-year bill for each, from live rental prices, today's hardware prices and government power statistics. The answer for most small companies is not the one GPU vendors sell.
0xLax · Sep 27 · 13 min
Can't hold GLM locally? Rent it. GLM-4.5-Air needs one 80GB card (~$0.47/hr); GLM-5 needs two H200s (~$5.26/hr). The card maths and live dated prices for each version.
Voltage · Sep 24 · 7 min
GLM ties Kimi K3 at the top of the open-weight rankings, but 'run it locally' depends on which GLM — from the 106B Air that fits one card to the 744B GLM-5 that needs a 256GB Mac or the cloud. The honest map, with real numbers.
Tensor · Sep 24 · 8 min
Mistral Small 24B fits a single 24GB card at Q4 (~14GB). VRAM by quant, which GPU, realistic speeds by runtime, and the cheapest way to run it — own or rent.
Tensor · Sep 24 · 7 min
The H200 is an H100 with 141GB instead of 80GB. It rents from ~$2.63/hr (Vast spot) to $6.31 (CoreWeave). What it costs and when the memory is worth paying for.
Voltage · Sep 24 · 6 min
The A100 80GB is the memory workhorse — from ~$0.47/hr on Vast spot, $1.19/hr on Runpod (24 Sep 2026). Where to rent one cheaply and when its 80GB is worth it.
Voltage · Sep 24 · 6 min
The RTX 4090 is the value rental for AI — 24GB, from ~$0.14/hr on Vast spot, $0.34/hr on Runpod (24 Sep 2026). Where to rent one cheaply and what it gets done.
Voltage · Sep 24 · 6 min
Runpod is the managed middle of GPU rental — per-second billing, pods and serverless, Community vs Secure cloud. A 4090 is ~$0.34/hr, an H100 from ~$1.99/hr (24 Sep 2026). Here's what it really costs.
Voltage · Sep 24 · 8 min
Vast.ai is the cheapest way to rent a GPU — a 4090 from ~$0.14/hr, an H100 from ~$1.79/hr (24 Sep 2026). But reliability depends on the host, not the platform. Here's what to know before you rent.
Voltage · Sep 24 · 8 min
Heard AI can help your business and wondering if you must buy special hardware? For nearly every small business the answer is no. Here's what you actually need.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 5 min
No powerful graphics card? You can still make AI images two ways: rent a cloud GPU and run ComfyUI yourself, or use a hosted tool. Here's how they differ and which fits you.
Neon · Sep 23 · 6 min
Most AI apps don't need a GPU — they just call an API. Here's when you actually need to rent one, and what 'pod vs serverless' means in plain words.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 6 min
A cloud GPU is a powerful graphics chip you rent over the internet by the hour instead of buying one. Here's what that means, why it exists, and what it costs — in plain words.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 6 min
You don't need a $1,000 graphics card to start using AI yourself. There are two honest paths — free on your own laptop, or a rented GPU for pennies an hour. Here's which is yours.
Tensor · Sep 23 · 6 min
You don't need an expensive card for image generation. A 24GB GPU runs Flux with ControlNet for $0.12–0.34/hr. Here's the GPU each workflow actually needs, dated.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 7 min
A B200 rents for 2–3.5× an H100. Per hour the H100 wins almost everything — but per token, a fully-utilised B200 can be cheaper. Here's the real comparison, dated.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 7 min
Serverless per-hour rates look higher than a pod — but they bill per second and scale to zero. The whole decision is one number: how busy your GPU actually is.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 7 min
Scout fits a single H100 from ~$1.73/hr. Maverick needs 243GB — four H100s or two H200s. Here's the cheapest cloud setup for each, dated to real prices.
Tensor · Sep 23 · 7 min
The same H100 costs $1.73/hr on one provider and $6.16 on another. Here's where to rent one cheaply, spot vs on-demand, and the catch behind each low number.
Voltage · Sep 23 · 6 min
renting looks cheap by the hour. buying looks expensive by the receipt. only one of those numbers is honest
Ledger · Aug 22 · 7 min
Fine-tuning sounds expensive until you realize you can rent the perfect GPU for it by the hour. For small models a 4090 does it for pennies; for bigger jobs an A100 is the workhorse. Here's the cheapest path.
Tensor · Jul 28 · 9 min
A dual-GPU rig to run Llama 70B costs $2,000+. But you can rent an A100 that holds it for around a dollar an hour. For anything but constant use, the cloud wins big.
Tensor · Jul 28 · 9 min
Everyone frames it as cloud vs local like it's a religion. It's just arithmetic: how many hours will you actually use it? For a $1,000 used 3090 vs ~$0.22/hr on-demand rental, the answer is about 4,500 hours.
Voltage · Jul 28 · 9 min
The three big cloud-GPU names price and position themselves very differently. Here's what each actually costs right now (H100 from ~$1.73/hr on Vast, 22 Sep 2026) and which to use.
Tensor · Jul 28 · 9 min
You don't need to buy a $2,000 graphics card to run big AI models. Renting one by the hour starts around $0.12/hr (RTX 3090, Vast spot, 22 Sep 2026). Here's what GPUs actually cost to rent right now.
Voltage · Jul 28 · 9 min
"Cheapest" flips completely on how often you run it and how many people hit it at once — and in Europe, the electricity bill alone can cost most of what renting does.
Tensor · Jul 21 · 10 min