How much does RunPod cost?
Every GPU rate, serverless, storage and the real monthly bill, worked out from the official prices.
Short answer: there's no free plan. You load prepaid credit and RunPod bills every second of GPU time against it. The cheapest card, an RTX A5000, costs $0.16/hr on Community Cloud and $0.27/hr on Secure Cloud. An RTX 4090 is $0.34/hr or $0.89/hr, an H100 SXM $2.69/hr or $3.99/hr. Egress is free. What blows up the bill is everything else: a volume disk left on a stopped pod at $0.20/GB a month, a pod sitting idle while you debug, a zero balance that wipes your files. Every number below comes straight from RunPod's 2026 rate card.
Affiliate link: the "Try RunPod" button uses our partner link. You pay the same price, and our 3.7/5 rating doesn't move.
RunPod GPU pricing, card by card
RunPod sells GPU time on two tiers. Community Cloud runs on third-party hosts: it's the cheaper rate card, and availability swings hour to hour. Secure Cloud runs in data centers RunPod picks: more expensive, more predictable. Forget the "Secure is twice the price" rule of thumb you'll see elsewhere. On an RTX 3090, Secure costs more than double ($0.50 vs $0.22). On an A100 SXM, it's only 29% more ($1.79 vs $1.39). Check both columns for the exact card you need. Each card below shows the Community rate up top and the Secure rate underneath.
Per GPU, per hour, in USD, billed by the second. Community up top, Secure below.
RTX A5000 · RTX 3090 · L4
24 GB for learning and light inference
$0.27/hr on Secure · RTX 3090 at $0.22 or $0.50
- 24 GB of VRAM fits a quantized 7-8B language model
- L4 24 GB: $0.44 on Community, $0.59 on Secure
- An A5000 on Community left on all month: $116.80
- The cheapest way to learn pods without risking real money
RTX 4090 · RTX 5090
The most compute per dollar on the list
$0.89/hr on Secure · RTX 5090 32 GB at $0.69 or $1.19
- A Community 4090 running 24/7: $248.20 a month
- Same card on Secure: $649.70, 2.6x more
- The 5090 adds 8 GB of VRAM for slightly heavier models
- Image gen, video, small-model inference: the best value card
RTX A6000 · A40 · L40S
48 GB for mid-size models
$0.59/hr on Secure · A40 at $0.35 or $0.59
- L40: $0.69 or $0.82 · RTX 6000 Ada: $0.74 or $0.99
- L40S: $0.79 on Community, $1.09 on Secure
- Pro 6000 MIG 48 GB (half a card): $1.00 or $1.29
- A Community A6000 costs less than a 4090 with twice the memory
A100 80 GB · RTX Pro 6000
The safe bet for fine-tuning
$1.79/hr on Secure · A100 SXM at $1.39 or $1.79
- On Secure, PCIe and SXM cost the same: take the SXM
- RTX Pro 6000 96 GB: $1.69 on Community, $2.49 on Secure
- A100 PCIe 24/7: $868.70 (Community) or $1,306.70 (Secure)
- 80 GB holds a quantized 70B model on a single card
H100 PCIe · SXM · NVL
Serious training and fast inference
$2.89/hr on Secure
- H100 SXM: $2.69 on Community, $3.99 on Secure
- H100 NVL 94 GB: $2.59 or $3.19
- A Community H100 SXM left on all month: $1,963.70
- SXM, with the fast card-to-card link, is the one for multi-GPU
H200 · B200 · B300
Frontier-size models
$5.29/hr on Secure
- B200 180 GB: $5.98 on Community, $7.99 on Secure
- B300: $6.94 or $8.99, the top of the rate card
- Multiple cards on one pod: the price multiplies, no discount
- Need 16 to 64 linked GPUs? See Instant Clusters below
RunPod's official 2026 rate card, 21 GPUs, per GPU per hour, billed by the second. First figure is Community Cloud, second is Secure Cloud. A listed price doesn't mean a machine is free right now: availability changes by the hour, especially on Community.
Serverless, storage and clusters: what they cost
A pod (a machine you start and stop yourself) is only one of three ways to pay RunPod. Serverless spins up workers on demand: you pay while a request runs and nothing while the endpoint sleeps. Storage is billed separately, per GB per month, and it's what catches most people. Instant Clusters rent dozens of linked GPUs by the hour for big training runs.
Public USD prices. Serverless shown as an hourly equivalent, billed by the second.
Serverless flex
Workers that scale to zero
RTX 4090 $1.34 · H100 $5.39 · L4 and 3090 $0.75
- Smallest cards (A4000, RTX 4000, RTX 2000): $0.58/hr
- H200 $6.99 · B200 $10.79 · B300 $11.99
- Three billed phases: cold start, execution, then a 5 s idle timeout by default
- No worker running, no charge
Storage
Billed per GB, even while the GPU sleeps
$0.05 above 1 TB · $0.14 high-performance
- Container disk: $0.10/GB/month while running, free when stopped, but wiped
- Volume disk (/workspace): $0.10 running, $0.20 stopped
- Network volume: same price running or stopped, survives pod termination
- Ingress and egress are free at any volume
Instant Clusters
16 to 64 linked GPUs, self-serve
H200 SXM at $6.35/hr per GPU
- 2 to 8 nodes of 8 GPUs, launched from the console
- 3,200 Gbps between nodes (1,600 Gbps on A100)
- H100, B200, L40S and reserved terms of 1 month or more: quote only
- Up to 512 GPUs through the sales team
Serverless "flex" rates, for workers that shut down when idle. "Active" workers stay on 24/7 and bill with no traffic, at a discount negotiated with RunPod sales; the percentage isn't public. Pulling your Docker image and downloading cached models while a worker is off isn't billed. An endpoint scales to 5 workers by default, and to 60 once your balance passes $900.
Six billing traps that inflate your RunPod invoice
Per-second billing makes RunPod feel nearly free. The invoices that shock people almost always come from the same places, and none of them is the GPU rate. Here's what users who got burned report, and what RunPod's docs spell out in the fine print.
Stopping a pod isn't terminating it
A stopped pod stops billing GPU time, but its volume disk (/workspace) stays put and jumps from $0.10 to $0.20/GB/month. The rate doubles right when you think you've stopped paying: 100 GB left behind costs $20 a month. A terminated pod costs nothing, but its volume disk is deleted with it. There's a third option in between, the network volume, covered next.
Network volumes are locked to one data center
A network volume costs $0.07/GB/month whether a pod is running or not, and it survives termination: 100 GB costs $7 instead of $20. Two catches. You attach it when you create the pod, never after. And it lives in one data center: if that location runs out of your GPU, you'll see "no GPUs available" while other regions have plenty. Pick the volume's location based on the card you rent most.
A zero balance can delete your work
When your credit hits zero, RunPod stops every pod. Pods with a network volume keep their data. Pods without one are terminated, and the files are gone for good. Auto-pay is off by default: turn it on before any multi-hour run, or keep a real buffer. Credits are also non-refundable, so top up in small amounts while you're still learning your burn rate.
Editing a running pod wipes the container disk
The container disk ($0.10/GB/month, free when stopped) is wiped on every stop, every reset and every edit to the pod, even a minor setting change. Anything you need to keep belongs in /workspace or on a network volume. A trap within the trap: some community templates don't write to /workspace at all. Run df -h on first boot to see where things actually land.
Paying to wait for a machine
The meter starts when the pod boots, not when your code runs. Several users describe burning a large share of their budget waiting for a Community machine to come up, or reinstalling the same dependencies every session. On Community, a host can also pull the machine mid-run. The fix: bake a ready-to-go Docker image ahead of time, save training state every hour, and shut the pod down the moment it stops doing work.
Serverless that ends up costing more than a pod
Serverless bills the cold start (the time to load your model into memory), then 5 seconds of idle time after each request. Users report 8 to 30 second cold starts on low-traffic endpoints, and close to a minute on the very first boot of a 7.5 GB model. RunPod advertises sub-200 ms starts with FlashBoot at no extra cost, but those pre-warmed workers can be evicted when capacity is tight. And a serverless hour costs more than a pod hour, so past a certain utilization the pod wins (the math is further down).
- Terminate pods you're done with, and keep files you need on a network volume.
- Turn on auto-pay before launching a run that lasts hours.
- Put your network volume in the data center where your usual GPU is available.
- Build your Docker image before you rent the GPU, not on its clock.
- Check the default $80/hr spend limit across all services before a big multi-GPU job.
- Back up results outside RunPod: it isn't built for archiving.
How we calculate the real cost
Every figure on this page starts from RunPod's official 2026 rate card and nothing else. A full month is 730 hours (24 h × 365 days ÷ 12). We always split Community and Secure, because the gap runs from 29% to more than double depending on the card. Storage gets added whenever a workload keeps files between sessions. For serverless, we only bill the hours a worker is actually up. Complaints from RunPod users shaped the six traps listed above, but none of the dollar amounts here come from them.
- Full month24 h × 365 days ÷ 12, never switched off730 h
- Rate cardCommunity and Secure, billed per secondOfficial
- Storagevolume disk at $0.20 stopped, network volume at $0.07Included
- Serverlesscold start, execution and 5 s idleActive hours
- Discountssavings plans retired, quote-only reservations excludedNone
- Competitorseach vendor's official page, before taxList prices
These amounts are calculations on the public rate card. Your invoice depends on your uptime, which card is available and how much storage you keep.
What RunPod actually costs, workload by workload
An hourly rate means nothing until you multiply it by hours. Here are six common workloads, priced line by line from the official rate card. The number that surprises people isn't the big-GPU bill. It's how much storage adds to a hobby setup when it's handled badly: close to half the GPU spend.
USD, official 2026 rate card, 730 h for a full month.
Evening image generation
RTX 4090 Community, 3 h a day, 22 days
$25.94 with a network volume
- GPU: $0.34 × 66 h = $22.44
- 50 GB volume disk left on the stopped pod: about $10
- Storage adds 45% on top of the GPU bill
- 50 GB network volume instead: $3.50, not $10
Small LLM, always on
RTX 4090, 24/7
$649.70 on Secure
- $0.34 × 730 h on Community
- $0.89 × 730 h on Secure
- A 7-8B model serving a team or an internal tool
- Secure earns its price once customers depend on it
70B model, always on
A100 PCIe 80 GB, 24/7
$1,306.70 on Secure
- $1.19 × 730 h on Community
- $1.79 × 730 h on Secure
- A quantized 70B model fits on one card
- A second GPU doubles the bill, no volume discount
70B model, business-hours traffic
Serverless A100, 4 billed hours a day
4x cheaper than a Secure pod running 24/7
- $2.72 × 4 h × 30 days = 120 billed hours
- Nothing to pay overnight or during quiet stretches
- Wins while utilization stays under 66% (vs a Secure pod)
- Against a $1.19 Community pod, the break-even drops to 44%
Fine-tuning a 7-8B model
LoRA on A100 SXM, 10 h
$13.90 on Community
- $1.79 × 10 h on Secure
- $1.39 × 10 h on Community
- LoRA trains a small add-on layer, not the whole model
- Data prep eats more hours than the GPU run itself
Fine-tuning a 70B model
QLoRA on H100 SXM, 24 h
$64.56 on Community
- $3.99 × 24 h on Secure
- $2.69 × 24 h on Community
- On Community, checkpoint at least every hour
- At the far end, a 64-GPU H200 cluster runs $406.40 an hour
Calculated from the official rate card, before tax. The 66% break-even is $1.79 ÷ $2.72 (Secure A100 pod vs serverless A100); the 44% one is $1.19 ÷ $2.72. Durations are typical workloads: swap in your own hours and the math still holds.
Six settings that cut your RunPod bill
Savings plans, which traded a commitment for a discount, are no longer sold. So savings now come from configuration, not negotiation. These are the moves that matter most, with the dollar effect of each.
The tips
Community to experiment, Secure to serve customers
Up to 62% offOn an RTX 4090, moving from Secure ($0.89) to Community ($0.34) cuts the bill by 62%. On an A100 SXM, the gap shrinks to 22% ($1.39 vs $1.79). The rule that works: anything that can survive an interruption (experiments, image batches, jobs you can rerun) goes on Community. Anything a customer depends on goes on Secure.
People who use both tiers sum it up the same way: Community is unbeatable for tinkering, but a machine can vanish mid-run. On the big cards the gap is small, so pay for Secure and sleep at night.
- 4090 Community
- $0.34/hr
- 4090 Secure
- $0.89/hr
- A100 SXM
- $1.39 or $1.79
On Secure, an A100 SXM for the price of a PCIe
Same priceOn Secure Cloud, the A100 PCIe and the A100 SXM both cost $1.79 an hour. The SXM links GPUs together much faster, which matters as soon as training spans several cards. At the same price, there's no reason to pick PCIe on Secure. On Community, though, PCIe is still $0.20 cheaper ($1.19 vs $1.39), so it's the one to take for single-GPU work.
- PCIe Secure
- $1.79/hr
- SXM Secure
- $1.79/hr
- PCIe Community
- $1.19/hr
A network volume beats a stopped pod
3x cheaperKeeping models on a stopped pod's disk costs $0.20/GB/month. The same files on a network volume cost $0.07, and $0.05 past 1 TB. For 200 GB of models, that's $40 vs $14 every month. Bonus: the network volume survives termination, so you can kill pods without a second thought and start a fresh one with your files already mounted.
Teams using orchestration tools pushed for this feature for one reason: to stop re-downloading tens of gigabytes of weights on every new machine.
- Stopped pod
- $0.20/GB/mo
- Network volume
- $0.07/GB/mo
- Above 1 TB
- $0.05/GB/mo
The exact serverless vs pod break-even
66%Divide the pod's hourly rate by the serverless rate for the same card. The result is the utilization above which the pod is cheaper. For an A100, $1.79 ÷ $2.72 gives 66% against a Secure pod, and $1.19 ÷ $2.72 gives 44% against a Community pod. For an RTX 4090, $0.89 ÷ $1.34 gives 66% on Secure, but only 25% on Community ($0.34 ÷ $1.34).
In plain terms, on a 4090: an endpoint busy less than 6 hours a day wins on serverless, even against a Community pod. Past 16 hours a day, the pod wins, even on Secure. Mind the ceiling too: 5 parallel workers by default, 60 once your balance is above $900.
- A100 vs Secure
- 66%
- A100 vs Community
- 44%
- 4090 vs Community
- 25%
Spot instances: a bid, not a price
Community onlyRunPod doesn't publish any spot rate on its pricing page. The discount exists anyway: from the CLI, runpodctl start pod --bid lets you set a price per GPU per hour, on Community Cloud only. A bid doesn't guarantee you keep the machine, so keep spot for jobs that checkpoint often. For a long-term discount, the only option left is a reserved cluster of one month or more, by quote.
- Spot
- Bid, price shown in console
- Savings plans
- No longer sold
- Reserved
- Quote, 1 month and up
The credits that actually exist
$5 to $25,000No free tier, but three real sources of credit. The referral bonus pays out after your first $10 top-up, and you need to sign up with Google. Outside Europe it's a weighted draw between $5 and $500: most people get $5, and about 96% get $10 or less. In Europe it's a flat $5. The startup program gives $1,000 in credits to pre-Series A companies with a live product (Starter). Growth adds a $25,000 bonus on $50,000 committed over 12 months, for teams already spending $5k to $25k a month on GPUs.
If you refer others: you earn 3% of their pod spend and 5% of their serverless spend for six months, in credits.
- Referral, outside Europe
- $5 to $500 draw
- Startup Starter
- $1,000
- Startup Growth
- $25k on $50k
Do you make a tool in this category? Email us: hello@hackceleration.com
RunPod vs Lambda, Modal, AWS and the rest
To compare like for like, we use the H100, the one card every provider sells. On-demand, RunPod is the cheapest on this list on Community, and still near the bottom on Secure. The others sell something besides the hourly rate: monthly credits, reserved capacity, hosted models, or being next to a cloud you already use. Each card also names their trap, because RunPod isn't the only one billing for things you thought were off.
Vendors' public 2026 prices, USD before tax, per H100 per hour.
RunPod
Per second, free egress
$3.99 on Secure · H100 PCIe from $1.99
- Widest range on the list: $0.16 to $8.99 an hour
- Serverless, pods and clusters under one account
- Trap: volume disk billed $0.20/GB/month on a stopped pod
Lambda
Stable bare machines, no community tier
$3.99 per GPU on an 8x machine
- Best for: teams training on H100 or B200 who want a stable box, no bidding
- B200 at $6.99 ($6.69 on 8x), GH200 at $2.29
- A100 SXM 80 GB at $2.79 on 8x, A10 at $1.29
- Limit: no cheap consumer cards
Modal
Per-second serverless with monthly credit
Free Starter plan with $30 of credit a month
- Best for: Python developers running bursty AI functions on the free monthly credit
- A100 80 GB about $2.50, L40S $1.95, L4 $0.80
- Team plan $250/month with $100 of credit
- Limit: pricier than a RunPod pod once a machine runs for long
Together AI
Clusters and hosted models
$1.99 preemptible · from $3.19 reserved
- Best for: products calling hosted open models, or teams booking a cluster
- H200 at $5.99, B200 at $8.19 per GPU
- Dedicated H100 endpoint: $5.49/hr
- Limit: the real discount requires a reservation
DigitalOcean
The GPUs formerly sold as Paperspace
L40S and RTX 6000 Ada at $1.57
- Best for: teams already on DigitalOcean who want GPUs in the same account
- H200 at $4.47, RTX 4000 Ada at $0.76, MI300X at $2.59
- Per second, with a 5-minute minimum
- Trap: a powered-off Droplet still bills, you have to destroy it
AWS
Reserved slots, not open on-demand
$47.757/hr for the 8x H100 instance
- Best for: companies whose data lives in S3 and who plan training runs ahead
- A100: $1.70 per GPU ($13.57/hr for 8)
- Makes sense when your data already lives on AWS
- Limit: whole 8-GPU instances, booked ahead of time
Vast.ai isn't in this table: it's a marketplace where each host sets its own price, with no published rate card. It also bills storage on stopped instances and, depending on the host, bandwidth. People who use both tend to recommend Vast for experiments and batch jobs, and RunPod for long runs and stable endpoints.
So, is RunPod expensive? Our take
We rate RunPod 3.7/5. On raw price, it's the cheapest on-demand GPU cloud we compared: an H100 for $2.69 an hour on Community, while the others start at $3.95 on-demand. It loses points elsewhere: patchy GPU availability, storage that bites, and support some users describe as slow.
Right for you if…
You experiment, generate images, fine-tune now and then, or serve a model with bursty traffic. You're fine shutting machines down yourself and keeping files on a network volume. In that case nothing on this list beats it on price: a LoRA run for $13.90, a month of evening image work for $25.94 storage included.
Wrong for you if…
You need a specific GPU at a specific time without negotiating. User reviews keep describing the same scene: a card nowhere to be found for hours, sometimes days, or a serverless endpoint stuck for lack of capacity. A team without shutdown discipline will also lose more on forgotten pods than it saves on the rate card. For guaranteed capacity, Lambda or a Together AI reservation is the safer call.
Our verdict
RunPod is the right pick for most AI projects that don't yet run around the clock. Put anything that can be interrupted on Community, anything customer-facing on Secure, and bursty traffic on serverless while utilization stays under 66%. Keep models on a network volume, turn on auto-pay, and terminate what you're not using.
- Community for experiments, Secure for production.
- Serverless under 66% utilization, a pod above it.
- Network volume for model weights, never a stopped pod.
- Auto-pay on before any long run.
RunPod pricing FAQ
Does RunPod really bill by the second?
Yes, for compute and storage alike. The hourly price is just a conversion: 10 minutes on a Community RTX 4090 costs about $0.06. There's no one-hour minimum and no setup fee. The only catch is at launch: your balance has to cover at least one hour of the configuration you pick. On serverless, each request rounds up to the next full second, cold start included.Does RunPod charge for stopped pods?
Yes, for storage. The GPU stops billing, but the volume disk (/workspace) goes from $0.10 to $0.20/GB/month for as long as the pod exists. Only a terminated pod costs nothing, and it takes its data with it. One upside: RunPod doesn't bill disks while the host machine itself is unavailable. To keep files without paying double, move them to a network volume at $0.07/GB/month.What's the cheapest GPU on RunPod?
The RTX A5000 24 GB, at $0.16 an hour on Community Cloud and $0.27 on Secure Cloud. Right behind it are the RTX 3090 ($0.22) and the RTX A6000 48 GB ($0.33), which doubles the memory for 17 cents more. On serverless, the smallest cards (A4000, RTX 4000, RTX 2000) start at $0.58 an hour. Cheapest isn't always most economical: a card that's short on VRAM will cost you hours.How much is an H100 on RunPod?
$1.99 to $3.99 an hour depending on the version and tier. H100 PCIe is $1.99 on Community and $2.89 on Secure; H100 SXM is $2.69 and $3.99; H100 NVL 94 GB is $2.59 and $3.19. On serverless, budget $5.39 an hour. Left on for a full month, a Community H100 SXM comes to $1,963.70. H100 Instant Clusters are quote-only.Is RunPod cheaper than Lambda or Vast.ai?
Cheaper than Lambda, yes: an H100 SXM is $2.69 on RunPod Community versus $4.29 for a single Lambda card, or $3.99 per GPU on Lambda's 8x machines. Vast.ai is harder to compare because every host sets its own price and there's no published rate card. Vast also bills bandwidth on some hosts and storage on stopped instances. In practice, people use Vast for cheap experiments and RunPod when they need a stable endpoint.What happens when my RunPod balance hits zero?
RunPod stops all your pods. Pods with a network volume keep their data; the rest are terminated and their files are gone for good. Auto-pay is off by default, so turn it on in billing before any long run. Credits you've already loaded are non-refundable, so top up in small amounts until you know your real burn rate.Does RunPod charge for egress?
No. RunPod charges nothing for ingress or egress, at any volume. Downloading a 140 GB model, pulling your results or serving files costs nothing beyond GPU time. That's not true everywhere: Vast.ai bills bandwidth depending on the host. Transfer time still counts, though: a big download on a running H100 costs whatever the H100 costs while it waits.Can you still get a commitment discount on RunPod?
Not self-serve. Savings plans have been retired: existing ones run to the end of their term, GPU only, non-refundable. Three options remain: reserved clusters of one month or more, by quote; active serverless workers, with a negotiated discount whose rate isn't public; and spot bidding on interruptible Community instances from the CLI.Do you pay for serverless cold starts on RunPod?
Yes, for most of it. RunPod bills from worker start until your handler is ready, which mostly means loading the model into memory. Pulling the Docker image isn't billed, and neither is downloading cached models while the worker is off. To shrink the cost, keep models lean, turn on FlashBoot and tune the 5-second idle timeout.Is there a spending limit on RunPod?
Yes, $80 an hour by default, across all services. It's a guardrail against misconfiguration, but it also blocks big jobs: eight B200s on Secure already cost $63.92 an hour, and an Instant Cluster blows past the limit fast. Ask support to raise it before you launch, not halfway through.
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