Pricing overview

How Vast.ai pricing works across instances, reserved, interruptible, and serverless, and how to choose between them.

Vast.ai is a marketplace, not a fixed-price provider. Hosts set their own rates and compete for your business, so prices vary with supply, demand, GPU model, location, and host reliability. You pay by the second for compute and continuously for storage.

This page summarizes every way you can pay for GPUs on Vast and helps you pick the right one. For the deep dives, see Instance pricing and Serverless pricing.

Rental models at a glance

Model	Priority	Best for	How you save
On-demand	High	Production, time-sensitive jobs, guaranteed uptime	Shop the marketplace for the best host price
Reserved	High	Long-running projects with predictable usage	Up to 50% off by pre-paying
Interruptible	Low (bidded)	Fault-tolerant or checkpointed workloads	Often 50%+ cheaper than on-demand; may be paused when outbid
Serverless	Managed	Bursty inference, variable demand	Autoscaler recruits the best price-performance workers

All four models rent the same underlying marketplace capacity, the difference is how you pay for it and what guarantees come with each.

What you’re billed for

Every rental, regardless of model, has three cost components:

• GPU compute, per-second while the instance is in a billable state. Varies by GPU model, count, reliability, and region.
• Storage, continuous while the instance exists, including when it is stopped. Delete the instance to stop storage billing.
• Bandwidth, per byte for both ingress and egress. Rates are host-set; check before picking data-intensive offers.

Serverless adds no surcharge on top of these, you pay the underlying worker costs directly. Workers that are inactive or still being recruited are only billed for storage and bandwidth, not compute. See Billing for workers for the full state table.

Choosing a model

I need guaranteed uptime

Use on-demand. Convert to reserved once you know you’ll run it for days or weeks, the discount is automatic from the instance card.

I can handle interruptions

Use interruptible. Checkpoint your work, save outputs to a volume or cloud storage, and set your bid based on how much priority you need.

My traffic is bursty

Use serverless. Define an endpoint with min_workers: 0 and let the autoscaler recruit capacity only when requests arrive.

I want to benchmark first

Spin up a short on-demand rental, record your throughput, then decide between reserved (steady workload) or serverless (variable workload).

Checking live prices

Prices move continuously. Always query current rates rather than relying on a quote:

• Web, cloud.vast.ai/create shows real-time marketplace offers with filters for GPU, price, reliability, and location.
• CLI, vastai search offers returns matching offers as JSON. See the search-offers reference.
• API, the search offers endpoint for programmatic access.

See also

• Instance pricing, full breakdown of on-demand, reserved, and interruptible
• Serverless pricing, worker and endpoint state billing tables
• Billing, credits, auto-billing, and payment methods
• Reserved instances, how to convert on-demand to reserved