cost

10 articles · newest first

Isometric cutaway illustration of a small data-center room: rows of dark server racks with blinking lights, a person holding a tablet, a cooling unit, and a round usage meter on the wall

Free until people show up: what a live app actually costs

Hosting is renting the always-on computer your app runs on — mostly free until real users arrive, then metered where it counts, and AI calls are the surprise line. Try the calculator.

Syntax · 3d ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a person weighing two GPU options on a balance scale, on a teal background

H100 vs B200 rental cost: the Blackwell premium, and the one number that flips it

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 · 6d ago · 7 min

Flat illustration of a person toggling a serverless GPU on and off — pay only while it runs — on a teal background

RunPod Serverless pricing, explained: why it looks pricier but usually isn't

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 · 6d ago · 7 min

Flat illustration of a person comparing cloud GPU rental prices on a laptop, on a teal background

the cheapest way to rent an H100 in 2026 is under $2 an hour — here's where

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 · 6d ago · 6 min

An electricity meter representing the running cost of local AI

what does it actually cost to run a local LLM? the electricity bill nobody calculates

Everyone talks about the GPU price, but a local AI rig has a running cost too. It's smaller than you fear — but if you're in Europe, it's not nothing. Here's the real math.

Voltage · Jul 28 · 9 min

A cloud GPU workstation for fine-tuning AI models

the best cloud GPU for fine-tuning an LLM costs about a dollar — here's the one to rent and why

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 data center GPU for running large AI models

the cheapest way to run Llama 70B isn't buying two GPUs — it's renting one big one for a couple dollars

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

A scale weighing cloud versus local computing

should you rent a cloud GPU or buy your own for AI? the break-even is simpler than you think

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

Cloud GPU servers in a data center for AI rental

the cheapest way to rent a GPU for AI in 2026 costs less than a coffee an hour — here's the live math

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

A high-end GPU workstation used for AI model training

everyone thinks fine-tuning an AI model costs a fortune. tuning Llama 8B on your own GPU costs about a coffee

The scary numbers you've seen are for training models from scratch. Fine-tuning an existing Llama 8B on your own data with QLoRA fits a 24GB card, uses ~14GB, and costs under a dollar per run if you rent. Here's the real math.

Tensor · Jul 28 · 9 min