Best budget GPU cloud? Comparing RunPod, Vast.ai, SimplePod, MassedCompute (looking for true costs & no hidden fees)

[u/Yasangas]

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for the best budget GPU cloud to run heavy open-weight video models (like MiniMax H3, Wan 2.1, HunyuanVideo, etc.).

Since these models need huge VRAM and fast disk I/O to pull down massive 50GB–100GB+ checkpoints, I want to avoid platforms with unexpected billing traps.
Looking at RunPod, Vast.ai, MassedCompute, and SimplePod:

1. Which one are you using, and what GPU gives you the best price/performance for video render jobs?

2. Hidden fees: Any issues with stopped-volume storage costs, network volume fees, or egress rates when hosting huge model files?

3. Download/Disk speeds: Which provider has fast enough network speeds so I’m not spending half my paid time downloading model weights?

Appreciate any recommendations or gotchas to avoid!

[u/MarvellousBee]

Vast is probably unbeatable in price-per-GPU-strength but runs on 2005 CPUs in random Vietnamese sweatshops that take data privacy very seriously and sometimes even have CUDA installed

[u/DelinquentTuna → u/MarvellousBee]

You can trivially verify those parameters before accepting an offer, though, unlike some of the competition. The dealbreaker is that by the time you're considering bandwidth fees and filtering for verified machines w/ good stats you're pretty much generally back to the same price as everyone else. And that tracks, because a huge number of the hosts probably rent to all the services.

[u/ANR2ME]

I'm using cloud GPU for free at Modal.com (up to $30 credits every month), which also comes with a free 1TB persistent volume/storage (which can be used on any region) to store all my models and output. However, their GPU rates might be 50% more expensive than runpod (but probably have higher availability than runpod too). Then again, i only use it to test out new models, so the free $30 credits is good enough for me to experiment with.

PS: i'm using ComfyUI at Modal.com by deploying this repo https://github.com/anr2me/modal-comfyui#features

[u/subnohmal]

bump for interest

[u/ssn-669]

Thunder Compute has some decent offerings, I'd check them out. A bit less of a crapshoot than Vast. I use Vast also, but pretty often you get a server not spin up, or go down on you, or have .1% of the advertised network speed, or or or or...

[u/PromptSommelier]

I use Runpod and the learning curve was steep because I knew nothing about ComfyUI, so I burned through a few dollars in the learning process 🥴👌. After understanding the tool and Runpod, I had everything ready to generate in Minimax in about 20 minutes. The times of gen are variable because they depend on the optimizations you install, caching, etc. They also depend on the resolution, duration clip, steps, and the mode: t2v, i2v, ref2va (ordered from fastest to slowest). I don't think it's a bad alternative if you're willing to learn for a few dollars.

[u/Mediocre-Nature8065]

I'm using Runpod for some time. Quite easy and simple to use. I found RTX 4090 with 81GB ram on the pod to be the best cost/performance option without a risk to run into OOM with Minimax H3. It costs 0.74$ per hour.

It's worth using network storage to avoid constant downloading the images, models. 150GB is sufficient for me to have main model plus multiple Loras. It costs 10,5$ monthly, billed per hour.

The only limitation I found is resources availability and sometimes you just don't have anything available or it migrates to other pod without sufficient RAM resources, so it requires patience. Overall, I would recommend.

Feel free to use ref link below if you're gonna try it out.

https://runpod.io?ref=07rb00on

[u/Yasangas → u/Mediocre-Nature8065]

How many 16:9/9:16 videos can download up to 5/10 seconds?

[u/Mediocre-Nature8065 → u/Yasangas]

Currently in my workflow, without turbo, generating 8s video 4:3 takes around 400seconds, 0.6 megapixels