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 brokers 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 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.

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 2026-08-05.

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.