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Vast.ai vs RunPod

OCT 2026 audit

A comparison of Vast.ai and RunPod built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 23 criteria compared

The short answer

Choose Vast.ai if…

Price-sensitive training and batch inference that can tolerate a marketplace — the median H100 SXM rate sits below what every managed cloud here lists for the same card, and interruptible capacity goes lower still.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose RunPod if…

Short experiments and bursty inference — per-second billing and a $0.27 entry card mean an idle hour costs nothing and a small job is genuinely small.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Vast.ai: There is no single price to plan against: rates move with supply, the host is not Vast itself, and an interruptible instance can be reclaimed mid-run.
  • RunPod: The catalogue mixes community and secure capacity, so the cheapest quoted rate is not always the tier a production workload should sit on.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: RunPod alternatives

17 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Vast.ai documentationVisit RunPod documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionVast.aiRunPod
Pricing
Entry paid plan$5 minimum deposit to add account credit before renting a GPU — there are no plan tiers, only prepaid credit drawn down by usage.A new account can start with as little as $10 in prepaid credits; deploying a Pod requires at least one hour of credits for the chosen configuration.
Pricing modelA marketplace rather than a cloud: prices are set by supply and demand across more than 40 data centers, in on-demand, interruptible and reserved tiers.Prepaid credit balance drawn down by usage: all compute and storage billed per second, with no data transfer fees.
Infrastructure
RegionsOn-demand instances span 40+ data centers with 20,000+ GPUs listed across the marketplace. Marketplace of third-party hosts; no named region list is published, offers are filtered by country code.31 regions across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia for on-demand GPU instances.
GPU
H100 SXM, per GPU-hour
Median $2.40 per hour for H100 SXM 80GB, with a floor of $1.73 from the cheapest host. Vast is a marketplace — the floor is one host's offer at one moment and the median is what the market is actually charging, so both move without anyone announcing anything. This figure is a snapshot, not a rate card.
$3.99 per hour for H100 SXM 80GB, single card, on Secure Cloud (the page's default view). The PCIe variant is $2.89 and H100 NVL is $3.19.
Cheapest GPU, per hour
$0.03 per hour, the floor from the cheapest host, shared by 4 cards: GTX TITAN X 12GB (median $0.04), RTX A2000 6GB (median $0.06), RTX 3060 12GB (median $0.07) and Tesla P100 16GB (median $0.09). The lowest median on the page is $0.04, for the GTX TITAN X.
$0.27 per hour for an RTX A5000 with 24GB, on Secure Cloud (the page's default view). RTX 3090 is $0.50, RTX 4090 $0.89, L40S $1.09.
Largest GPU offered
288GB per GPU on B300 Blackwell Ultra, from $9.93 an hour with a median of $9.93. B200 at 192GB is from $6.25 with a median of $9.13.
288GB per GPU on B300; B200 at 180GB is $7.99 an hour and H200 at 141GB is $5.29, on Secure Cloud (the page's default view).
Billing granularityPer-second billing on GPU rentals: charged down to the second, with no minimum hours and no rounding up.Per second, with per-hour rates shown for comparison. Clusters can be started with no commitment and scaled to 64 GPUs.
Reserved pricingUp to 50% off by pre-paying for GPU time, the discount scaling with commitment length over 1, 3 or 6 month pre-paid periods.Savings plans: a 3-month or 6-month upfront prepaid commitment discounts GPU compute costs; storage stays at standard rates and plans are non-refundable.
Compliance
SOC 2SOC 2 Type 2 certification completed, audited by an independent third party against AICPA Trust Services Criteria; report available under a signed NDA.SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations completed; reports are listed in the Runpod Trust Center and some require approved access before download.
ISO 27001
Listed only among certifications Secure Cloud datacenter partners may hold; encouraged and strengthens a partner's application but not strictly required. Appears under Secure Cloud datacenter partner requirements, not under Vast.ai's own Certifications & Standards.
ISMS certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Sensiba LLP; certificate RUN-ISMS-20260827 valid 27 August 2026 through 26 August 2029. Scope limited to the ISMS supporting Runpod's services and platform, not individual products.
HIPAAHIPAA-covered workloads are supported on the Secure Cloud tier; Business Associate Agreements are available for qualifying customers.Maintains a HIPAA program; HIPAA sits among the Trust Center compliance resources, some of which require approved access before download.
GDPR / data residency
Standard DPA bars storing or transferring Personal Data outside the EEA absent an adequacy decision unless appropriate guarantees apply; SCCs incorporated. Covers Personal Data under the DPA; no EU-only workload region is offered as a product option.
Stated fully GDPR compliant for data processed in European data center regions, with documented EU procedures for collection, storage, processing and deletion.
PCI DSSNamed only in the list of certifications Secure Cloud datacenter partners may hold, alongside HIPAA and HITRUST. Partner-held certification, not a platform certification claim.Claimed for Secure Cloud's vetted infrastructure partners, who meet enterprise standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications. Stated of the data-centre partners behind Secure Cloud, not of Runpod Inc. itself.
Encryption at restThe security FAQ puts this on the customer: for maximum security it advises encrypting sensitive data at rest and encrypting data before uploading.Optional per-Pod volume encryption: the volume disk is encrypted at rest on the host machine, but container disk and network volumes cannot be encrypted.
Role-based access controlTeam roles assign permissions and access levels per member: Owner, Manager and Member defaults, plus custom roles built from read/write permission groups.Four team roles — Basic, Billing, Dev and Admin — each with set permissions; Admin has unrestricted access to members, settings, billing and resources.
Private networking / VPCOverlay networks give instances on the same physical cluster a private virtual LAN separate from the host network and other tenants; Docker templates only.Global networking gives each Pod a private IP reachable only by other Pods in the same account; NVIDIA GPU Pods only, in 17 data centers.
Dedicated infrastructureThe Clusters product provides dedicated environments scaling from tens to hundreds of GPUs or CPUs, with custom networking and storage configurations.Reserved Clusters: dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations and SLA-backed uptime for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Entry paid plan

Vast.ai
$5 minimum deposit to add account credit before renting a GPU — there are no plan tiers, only prepaid credit drawn down by usage.
RunPod
A new account can start with as little as $10 in prepaid credits; deploying a Pod requires at least one hour of credits for the chosen configuration.
Sources (2) →

Pricing model

Vast.ai
A marketplace rather than a cloud: prices are set by supply and demand across more than 40 data centers, in on-demand, interruptible and reserved tiers.
RunPod
Prepaid credit balance drawn down by usage: all compute and storage billed per second, with no data transfer fees.
Sources (2) →

Regions

Vast.ai
On-demand instances span 40+ data centers with 20,000+ GPUs listed across the marketplace. Marketplace of third-party hosts; no named region list is published, offers are filtered by country code.
RunPod
31 regions across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia for on-demand GPU instances.
Sources (2) →

H100 SXM, per GPU-hour

Vast.ai
Median $2.40 per hour for H100 SXM 80GB, with a floor of $1.73 from the cheapest host. Vast is a marketplace — the floor is one host's offer at one moment and the median is what the market is actually charging, so both move without anyone announcing anything. This figure is a snapshot, not a rate card.
RunPod
$3.99 per hour for H100 SXM 80GB, single card, on Secure Cloud (the page's default view). The PCIe variant is $2.89 and H100 NVL is $3.19.
Sources (2) →

Cheapest GPU, per hour

Vast.ai
$0.03 per hour, the floor from the cheapest host, shared by 4 cards: GTX TITAN X 12GB (median $0.04), RTX A2000 6GB (median $0.06), RTX 3060 12GB (median $0.07) and Tesla P100 16GB (median $0.09). The lowest median on the page is $0.04, for the GTX TITAN X.
RunPod
$0.27 per hour for an RTX A5000 with 24GB, on Secure Cloud (the page's default view). RTX 3090 is $0.50, RTX 4090 $0.89, L40S $1.09.
Sources (2) →
  • GPU Pricing - Live Platform Rates | Vast.ai ↗

    “GTX TITAN X Maxwell 12GB VRAM from $0.03 /hr median $0.04/hr [...] RTX A2000 Ampere 6GB VRAM from $0.03 /hr median $0.06/hr [...] RTX 3060 Ampere 12GB VRAM from $0.03 /hr median $0.07/hr [...] Tesla P100 Pascal 16GB VRAM from $0.03 /hr median $0.09/hr”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — RunPod ↗

    “RTX A5000 24 GB VRAM 25 GB RAM 9 vCPUs $ 0.27 /hr [...] RTX 3090 24 GB VRAM 125 GB RAM 16 vCPUs $ 0.5 /hr [...] RTX 4090 24 GB VRAM 41 GB RAM 6 vCPUs $ 0.89 /hr [...] L40S 48 GB VRAM 94 GB RAM 16 vCPUs $ 1.09 /hr”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official pricing · Report a correction

Largest GPU offered

Vast.ai

288GB per GPU on B300 Blackwell Ultra, from $9.93 an hour with a median of $9.93. B200 at 192GB is from $6.25 with a median of $9.13.

RunPod

288GB per GPU on B300; B200 at 180GB is $7.99 an hour and H200 at 141GB is $5.29, on Secure Cloud (the page's default view).

Sources (2) →

Billing granularity

Vast.ai
Per-second billing on GPU rentals: charged down to the second, with no minimum hours and no rounding up.
RunPod
Per second, with per-hour rates shown for comparison. Clusters can be started with no commitment and scaled to 64 GPUs.
Sources (2) →

Reserved pricing

Vast.ai
Up to 50% off by pre-paying for GPU time, the discount scaling with commitment length over 1, 3 or 6 month pre-paid periods.
RunPod
Savings plans: a 3-month or 6-month upfront prepaid commitment discounts GPU compute costs; storage stays at standard rates and plans are non-refundable.
Sources (2) →

SOC 2

Vast.ai
SOC 2 Type 2 certification completed, audited by an independent third party against AICPA Trust Services Criteria; report available under a signed NDA.
RunPod
SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations completed; reports are listed in the Runpod Trust Center and some require approved access before download.
Sources (2) →
  • Compliance | Vast.ai ↗

    “Vast.ai has completed SOC 2 Type 2 certification. This audit, conducted by an independent third party, verified that our security, availability, and confidentiality controls meet AICPA Trust Services Criteria over a sustained observation period. The SOC 2 Type 2 report is available under a signed NDA”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

  • AI Infrastructure Security & Compliance | Runpod ↗

    “Runpod has also completed SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations, and maintains HIPAA and GDPR programs. [...] The Runpod Trust Center lists current compliance resources, including the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, HIPAA, GDPR, and the SOC 2 Bridge Letter 2026. Some documents require approved access before download.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

ISO 27001

Vast.ai
Listed only among certifications Secure Cloud datacenter partners may hold; encouraged and strengthens a partner's application but not strictly required. Appears under Secure Cloud datacenter partner requirements, not under Vast.ai's own Certifications & Standards.
RunPod
ISMS certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Sensiba LLP; certificate RUN-ISMS-20260827 valid 27 August 2026 through 26 August 2029. Scope limited to the ISMS supporting Runpod's services and platform, not individual products.
Sources (2) →
  • Compliance | Vast.ai ↗

    “Certifications held by datacenter partners may include: [...] ISO 27001, ISO 20000-1, ISO 22301, ISO 14001 [...] Security certifications such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2 are encouraged and strengthen a partner's application, but are not strictly required for certification.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

  • AI Infrastructure Security & Compliance | Runpod ↗

    “Runpod Inc. operates an Information Security Management System certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Sensiba LLP, an ANAB-accredited certification body. Certificate RUN-ISMS-20260827 is valid from August 27, 2026 through August 26, 2029. [...] Certification covers the management system, not individual products or services.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

HIPAA

Vast.ai
HIPAA-covered workloads are supported on the Secure Cloud tier; Business Associate Agreements are available for qualifying customers.
RunPod
Maintains a HIPAA program; HIPAA sits among the Trust Center compliance resources, some of which require approved access before download.
Sources (2) →
  • Compliance | Vast.ai ↗

    “Vast.ai supports HIPAA-covered workloads on our Secure Cloud tier. Technical safeguards — including data isolation, access controls, and audit logging — align with HIPAA requirements. Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) are available for qualifying customers.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

  • AI Infrastructure Security & Compliance | Runpod ↗

    “Runpod has also completed SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations, and maintains HIPAA and GDPR programs. [...] Some documents require approved access before download.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

GDPR / data residency

Vast.ai
Standard DPA bars storing or transferring Personal Data outside the EEA absent an adequacy decision unless appropriate guarantees apply; SCCs incorporated. Covers Personal Data under the DPA; no EU-only workload region is offered as a product option.
RunPod
Stated fully GDPR compliant for data processed in European data center regions, with documented EU procedures for collection, storage, processing and deletion.
Sources (2) →
  • Data Processing Agreement | Vast.ai ↗

    “Processor shall not export, transfer, store, remotely access Personal Data, or permit any of the latter in/from a country which is not part of the European Economic Area and does not benefit from an adequacy recognition decision of the European Commission pursuant to Article 45 of the GDPR [...] the Parties hereby agree to and incorporate the Standard Contractual Clauses into this Agreement”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

  • Data security and legal compliance - Runpod Documentation ↗

    “Runpod is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for data processed in European data center regions. [...] For servers hosted in GDPR-compliant regions like the European Union, Runpod maintains clear procedures for the collection, storage, processing, and deletion of personal data.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official docs · Report a correction

PCI DSS

Vast.ai
Named only in the list of certifications Secure Cloud datacenter partners may hold, alongside HIPAA and HITRUST. Partner-held certification, not a platform certification claim.
RunPod
Claimed for Secure Cloud's vetted infrastructure partners, who meet enterprise standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications. Stated of the data-centre partners behind Secure Cloud, not of Runpod Inc. itself.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

Vast.ai
The security FAQ puts this on the customer: for maximum security it advises encrypting sensitive data at rest and encrypting data before uploading.
RunPod
Optional per-Pod volume encryption: the volume disk is encrypted at rest on the host machine, but container disk and network volumes cannot be encrypted.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Vast.ai
Team roles assign permissions and access levels per member: Owner, Manager and Member defaults, plus custom roles built from read/write permission groups.
RunPod
Four team roles — Basic, Billing, Dev and Admin — each with set permissions; Admin has unrestricted access to members, settings, billing and resources.
Sources (2) →
  • Teams Roles - Vast.ai Documentation: Affordable GPU Cloud Marketplace ↗

    “Team roles in Vast.ai's platform are designed to streamline collaboration and enhance security by assigning specific permissions and access levels to different members of a team. [...] Custom roles allow team managers to create roles with custom, tailored permissions via permission groups.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Manage accounts - Runpod Documentation ↗

    “Runpod provides four distinct roles to control access within team accounts. Each role includes specific permissions designed for different responsibilities. [...] Administrators have unrestricted access to manage team members, configure account settings, handle billing, and control all team computing resources.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official docs · Report a correction

Private networking / VPC

Vast.ai
Overlay networks give instances on the same physical cluster a private virtual LAN separate from the host network and other tenants; Docker templates only.
RunPod
Global networking gives each Pod a private IP reachable only by other Pods in the same account; NVIDIA GPU Pods only, in 17 data centers.
Sources (2) →

Dedicated infrastructure

Vast.ai
The Clusters product provides dedicated environments scaling from tens to hundreds of GPUs or CPUs, with custom networking and storage configurations.
RunPod
Reserved Clusters: dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations and SLA-backed uptime for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs.
Sources (2) →
  • GPU Clusters | Vast.ai ↗

    “Our dedicated environments ensure reliable throughput and flexible resource allocations [...] Seamlessly scale from tens to hundreds of GPUs or CPUs [...] Get exactly the CPU/GPU mix you need, plus custom networking and storage configurations”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official site · Report a correction

  • GPU Cloud Pricing | Per-Second H100, A100, RTX | Runpod ↗

    “Reserved Clusters Dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations, SLA-backed uptime, and discounted rates for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs.”

    Read 2026-10-17 · official pricing · Report a correction

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

Free tierVast.ai: No
Kind of free offerVast.ai: No free offer
Credit card to startVast.ai: Yes
Uptime SLARunPod: 99.99% uptime SLA, in an enterprise agreement only. Self-serve accounts run at usage-based rates with no contract, and contractual SLAs are added with reserved capacity and committed-use pricing.
Storage priceRunPod: From $0.05 per GB per month, for standard network storage over 1TB ($0.07 under 1TB); high-performance network storage is $0.14 per GB per month.
Customer-managed keysRunPod: Not supported: Runpod stores the volume encryption key, which cannot be retrieved, and the docs state bring your own key is not supported.Vast.ai: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Vast.ai.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Vast.ai or RunPod?

Vast.ai: $5 minimum deposit to add account credit before renting a GPU — there are no plan tiers, only prepaid credit drawn down by usage.

RunPod: A new account can start with as little as $10 in prepaid credits; deploying a Pod requires at least one hour of credits for the chosen configuration.

Should I choose Vast.ai or RunPod?

Pick Vast.ai if Price-sensitive training and batch inference that can tolerate a marketplace — the median H100 SXM rate sits below what every managed cloud here lists for the same card, and interruptible capacity goes lower still.

Pick RunPod if Short experiments and bursty inference — per-second billing and a $0.27 entry card mean an idle hour costs nothing and a small job is genuinely small.

Provider pages

Vast.aiGPU marketplace where independent hosts set prices, published as live floor and median rates across 40+ data centres.RunPodPer-GPU cloud billed by the second, with community and secure tiers and no minimum commitment.

Related comparisons

CoreWeave vs RunPodCoreWeave vs Vast.aiModal vs RunPodReplicate vs RunPodRunPod vs BasetenRunPod vs HyperstackRunPod vs LambdaVast.ai vs Hyperstack

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.