# RunPod

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/gpu/runpod/

Per-GPU cloud billed by the second, with community and secure tiers and no minimum commitment.

## Who it suits

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.

Consider something else if The catalogue mixes community and secure capacity, so the cheapest quoted rate is not always the tier a production workload should sit on.

## iScore

58 / 100 (80% interval 52–64), rank 1 of 13 in gpu — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Read this score with care:
- Price is thin: 2 of 10 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (36–57). Read the interval, not the point.
- Capabilities is thin: 0 of 1 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (94–100). Read the interval, not the point.
- Documented but not scored, because the page states it as text with no comparable number or a yes/limited/no (a one-time, usage-based or other-vendor price, or a per-site choice): storage_price, uptime_sla. Read them on the provider page; the score neither rewards nor penalises what it could not compare.

Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every gpu peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/gpu/runpod/alternatives/

- Price: 47 (36–57), weight 50%, 2 of 10 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: budget_input_price, egress_overage_price, flagship_input_price, flagship_output_price, free_card_required, free_offer_type, free_tier, storage_price
- Capacity and limits: 56 (43–69), weight 24%, 2 of 3 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: context_window
- Capabilities: 100 (94–100), weight 3%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: prompt_caching
- Trust and compliance: 73 (67–79), weight 13%, 10 of 12 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: support_included, uptime_sla
- Evidence: 90 (90–90), weight 11%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Entry paid plan: 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. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/accounts-billing/billing), read 2026-10-17)
- Pricing model: Prepaid credit balance drawn down by usage: all compute and storage billed per second, with no data transfer fees. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/accounts-billing/billing), read 2026-10-17)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 31 regions across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia for on-demand GPU instances. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/product/cloud-gpus), read 2026-10-17)
- Uptime SLA: 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. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/enterprise), read 2026-10-17)

### Storage

- Storage price: 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. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/pricing), read 2026-10-17)

### GPU

- H100 SXM, per GPU-hour: $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. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/pricing), read 2026-10-17)
- Cheapest GPU, per hour: $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. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/pricing), read 2026-10-17)
- Largest GPU offered: 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). ([source](https://www.runpod.io/pricing), read 2026-10-17)
- Billing granularity: Per second, with per-hour rates shown for comparison. Clusters can be started with no commitment and scaled to 64 GPUs. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/pricing), read 2026-10-17)
- Reserved pricing: 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. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/pods/pricing), read 2026-10-17)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations completed; reports are listed in the Runpod Trust Center and some require approved access before download. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/legal/compliance), read 2026-10-17)
- ISO 27001: 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. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/legal/compliance), read 2026-10-17)
- HIPAA: Maintains a HIPAA program; HIPAA sits among the Trust Center compliance resources, some of which require approved access before download. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/legal/compliance), read 2026-10-17)
- GDPR / data residency: Stated fully GDPR compliant for data processed in European data center regions, with documented EU procedures for collection, storage, processing and deletion. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/references/security-and-compliance), read 2026-10-17)
- PCI DSS: 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. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/references/security-and-compliance), read 2026-10-17)
- Encryption at rest: 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. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/pods/storage/types), read 2026-10-17)
- Customer-managed keys: Not supported: Runpod stores the volume encryption key, which cannot be retrieved, and the docs state bring your own key is not supported. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/pods/storage/types), read 2026-10-17)
- Role-based access control: Four team roles — Basic, Billing, Dev and Admin — each with set permissions; Admin has unrestricted access to members, settings, billing and resources. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/accounts-billing/manage-accounts), read 2026-10-17)
- Private networking / VPC: 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. ([source](https://docs.runpod.io/pods/networking), read 2026-10-17)
- Dedicated infrastructure: Reserved Clusters: dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations and SLA-backed uptime for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs. ([source](https://www.runpod.io/pricing), read 2026-10-17)

## Compared with

- [RunPod vs CoreWeave](https://inetgeek.com/compare/coreweave-vs-runpod/)
- [RunPod vs Hyperstack](https://inetgeek.com/compare/runpod-vs-hyperstack/)
- [RunPod vs Lambda](https://inetgeek.com/compare/runpod-vs-lambda/)
- [RunPod vs Vast.ai](https://inetgeek.com/compare/vast-ai-vs-runpod/)
- [RunPod vs Replicate](https://inetgeek.com/compare/replicate-vs-runpod/)
- [RunPod vs Modal](https://inetgeek.com/compare/modal-vs-runpod/)
- [RunPod vs Baseten](https://inetgeek.com/compare/runpod-vs-baseten/)