Spheron vs Aquanode
Decentralized GPU network with published on-demand rates
Spheron publishes aggressive rates on a decentralized supply network and is genuinely cheap on consumer-class GPUs. If your workload is a one-shot job the price is hard to argue with; if you are rebuilding the same environment every time you rent, the price is not what is costing you.
Where Spheron wins
- Published headline rates on consumer GPUs that are among the lowest we have verified first-party.
- A wide decentralized supply base, including newer SKUs listed early.
Where Aquanode wins
- Your environment survives the box. Pause a deployment, come back tomorrow, resume with packages, model weights and config intact — instead of rebuilding from a fresh image every session.
- A snapshot taken on one provider restores onto another. Supply moved, price moved, or a region ran dry — the environment follows, rather than being stranded in the account that created it.
- One account across every provider we broker, so you are not maintaining separate logins, keys and billing per vendor to chase capacity.
- Automated backups are on by default when you attach storage at deploy time, at a 6-hour interval — you do not have to remember to configure them.
Spheron pricing vs Aquanode
Spheron figures are Published on-demand rates, 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.spheron.network/pricing — Published on-demand rates, 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.
Spheron vs Aquanode: common questions
Is Spheron cheaper than Aquanode?
On several consumer GPUs their published rate is lower than a lot of brokered on-demand supply, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Compare their column against our live column on this page for the model you actually want.
