Paperspace vs Aquanode
GPU cloud and notebooks, now part of DigitalOcean
Paperspace is now part of DigitalOcean, and its persistent-machine model is closer to ours than most of this list: a Paperspace machine does keep its disk. The gap is that the machine is the unit: it lives in one account, on one vendor's hardware, and cannot be re-materialised somewhere cheaper.
Where Paperspace wins
- Persistent machines with attached storage that survive a stop: the core habit of keeping your environment is already there.
- Integration with the wider DigitalOcean platform, so networking, object storage and the rest of an app can live next to the GPU.
- Gradient notebooks for people who want a hosted notebook rather than a box.
Where Aquanode wins
- Your setup outlives the GPU you rented it on. Save the environment (custom nodes, model weights, packages, the config you spent an evening getting right) and bring it back up later on a completely different provider, instead of reinstalling it from scratch every session.
- Supply moved, the price moved, or the region ran dry. Your environment follows you out. It is not stranded in the account that happened to create it, which is the part that makes leaving any single vendor cheap.
- Pause and resume in place on every provider we support: it's a snapshot-and-terminate, then a fresh box restored from that snapshot, the same mechanism everywhere. (Voltage Park's adapter supports it too, it just has no live GPUs to rent right now.) On any provider, the same environment also comes back by restoring your saved setup onto a fresh box, a little slower, same result.
- Turn on automatic snapshots yourself and pick the interval (as often as every 15 minutes, 30 by default) instead of remembering to snapshot by hand or wiring up your own cron job.
- One account, one bill and one set of keys across every provider we support, rather than a separate login and invoice per vendor every time you chase capacity.
- Run a saved version of your setup as a job. If a provider takes the box back mid-run, we detect the loss and queue the run to retry on a different provider, excluding the one that just lost it, and if the job checkpoints the next attempt picks up from the last one. Jobs scale to zero when the queue empties, so an idle one is not sitting on a rented GPU, and every job is bounded in the unit we bill: its time limit times its attempts times its machines is the most a single run can cost.
Paperspace pricing vs Aquanode
Paperspace figures are Paperspace machines, hourly, per GPU, read from their own pricing page on 2026-08-05. The Aquanode column is the lowest live per-GPU rate in our marketplace feed and moves on its own. The two columns are not measured the same way, so treat this as a starting point, not a quote.
Source: https://www.paperspace.com/pricing, Paperspace machines, hourly, per GPU. Verified 2026-08-05. Vendors change prices; check theirs before deciding.
What we do not claim
Restoring an environment requires a snapshot that already exists. Stopping a deployment yourself captures it on the way out, so you can bring it back later on any provider. A provider-side termination is different: it is only recoverable if you had already switched automated snapshots on for that deployment, and it costs you the work since the last one. Automated snapshots are opt-in, nothing runs until you start it, and with none running there is nothing to restore.
`aq deploy --snapshot <id>` rents the cheapest matching GPU and restores your snapshot onto it, including onto a different provider than the one it came from. Creating the snapshot is a separate step today: the standalone ogre CLI on the box writes it.
Paperspace vs Aquanode: common questions
Paperspace machines already persist. Why move?
Because persistence and portability are different things. A Paperspace machine keeps its disk, on Paperspace. An Aquanode snapshot restores onto a different provider, which is what you need when capacity or price moves rather than when you simply stop for the night.
