No fixed closing date.
Hourly GPU rentals
RunPod and Vast.ai
RunPod and Vast.ai rent GPUs by the hour. You need a card, not a university email. This is the fast alternative when a grant will take weeks and Kaggle is too small. It is also the easiest way to accidentally spend more than you meant.
Paid by the hour, plus storage if you keep a disk. There is no standard education discount to assume. Stop the machine when the job finishes.
Who it is for
Anyone who can pay. No affiliation, no application, and no queue behind a merit panel.
What you get
A virtual machine with the GPU you pick, for as long as you leave it on. You choose the chip and the memory. Prices are set by the providers and change.
How to get it
- Decide how much GPU memory the model needs before you look at prices. An under-sized GPU wastes the hour.
- Compare the live price on RunPod and on Vast.ai for that chip. This guide does not quote a price because it will be wrong next week.
- Start the machine, copy the code, run the job, download the result, and stop the machine.
- Set a spending limit or a low starting balance so a forgotten instance cannot run all night.
Deadlines
There is no published closing date. Apply when your one-page description is ready. An empty calendar file would only pretend otherwise, so this page does not invent a reminder.
Read this before you apply
- A rented GPU does not make a single-core R script faster. Rent CPU memory only if that is the bottleneck.
- Read the provider’s data terms before you upload participant data or anything under a contract.
- This is not a grant. It is a shop.
Check before you rely on this
- Hourly prices were deliberately not copied. Check the live listing.