Vast.ai vs Aquanode
Peer-to-peer GPU marketplace where hosts set their own prices
Vast.ai is usually the cheapest raw dollar-per-hour on the market, because hosts bid against each other and you absorb the variance in reliability. Aquanode supports Vast.ai among other providers, so the honest framing is not us-versus-them on price: it is that an environment built on a Vast machine can be snapshotted and moved off it.
Where Vast.ai wins
- Raw price. A host-bid marketplace with interruptible instances will beat brokered on-demand capacity on the low end, and that is by design.
- Breadth of consumer hardware: long-tail GPUs and configurations that most managed clouds never list.
- Fine-grained control over host selection, reliability scores and bidding, if you want to run that optimisation yourself.
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.
Vast.ai pricing
We could not verify a Vast.ai price first-party, so this page publishes none. Vast.ai publishes no fixed hourly rate to quote. Its own documentation states that hosts set their own prices and rates move with real-time supply and demand, so any single number we printed here would be stale the moment it shipped. We link the source instead of inventing a figure.
Checked https://docs.vast.ai/pricing on 2026-09-19.
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.
Vast.ai vs Aquanode: common questions
Do you resell Vast.ai capacity?
Vast.ai is one of the providers Aquanode supports, so some listings you see in our marketplace are Vast machines. The difference is what wraps them: your environment is saved off the machine, so it is not tied to the box you started on and can be restored onto a different provider later.
Why does this page not list Vast.ai prices?
Because Vast.ai does not publish fixed prices: hosts set them and they move continuously. Printing a number here would be a guess dressed as a citation. Our own live rates are on this page and update from the marketplace feed.
How does Vast.ai work?
Vast.ai describes itself as a marketplace for affordable GPU cloud computing. Its documentation says it connects compute providers, from hobbyists to Tier-4 datacenters, with users who need GPUs, and that its search lets you filter by GPU type, RAM, CPU and bandwidth while providers retain full control over pricing and contracts.
Source: https://docs.vast.ai/, read 2026-09-02.
Who owns the machines on Vast.ai?
Whoever listed them. Vast.ai's documentation says you scale across thousands of GPUs from Secure Cloud datacenters or community providers, spanning hobbyists through Tier-4 datacenters. Because each provider sets its own price, the same GPU model can appear at very different rates.
Source: https://docs.vast.ai/, read 2026-09-02.
