Explore pricing options for Pods, including on-demand, savings plans, and spot instances.
Runpod offers custom pricing plans for large scale and enterprise workloads. If you’re interested in learning more, contact our sales team.
Runpod offers multiple flexible pricing options for Pods, designed to accommodate a variety of workloads and budgets.
All Pods are billed by the second for compute and storage, with no additional fees for data ingress or egress. Every Pod has an hourly cost based on its GPU type or CPU configuration, and your Runpod credits are charged for the Pod every second it is active.
You can find the hourly cost of a specific GPU configuration on the Runpod console during Pod deployment.
Runpod provides three options for Pod pricing:
On-demand instances are designed for non-interruptible workloads. When you deploy an on-demand Pod, the required resources are dedicated to your Pod. As long as you have sufficient funds in your account, your on-demand Pod cannot be displaced by other users and will run without interruption.
You must have at least one hour’s worth of time in your balance for your selected Pod configuration to rent an on-demand instance. If your balance is completely drained, all Pods are subject to deletion at the discretion of the Runpod system.
Benefits:
Use on-demand pricing for:
Savings plans offer a way to pay upfront for a defined period and receive a discount on compute costs in return. This is an excellent option when you know you will need prolonged access to specific compute resources.
You commit to a usage term (3 months or 6 months) by making an upfront payment. During this term, you’ll be charged a considerably lower hourly rate for your Pod.
When you stop a Pod, the savings plan associated with it applies to your next deployment of the same GPU type. This means you can continue to benefit from your savings commitment even during temporary pauses in your Pod usage.
Savings plans require an upfront payment for the entire committed term and are generally non-refundable. Stopping your Pod does not extend the duration of your savings plan; each plan has a fixed expiration date set at the time of purchase.
Benefits:
Use savings plans for:
Spot instances allow you to access spare Runpod compute capacity at significantly lower prices than on-demand rates. These instances are interruptible, meaning they can be terminated by Runpod if the capacity is needed for on-demand or savings plan Pods, or if another user outbids you for the Spot capacity.
While resources are dedicated to your Pod when it’s running, the instance can be stopped if a higher bid is placed or an on-demand deployment requires the resources.
Spot instances can be terminated with only a 5-second warning (SIGTERM signal, followed by SIGKILL). Your application must be designed to handle such interruptions gracefully.
It is crucial to periodically save your work to a volume disk or push data to cloud storage, especially within the 5-second window after a SIGTERM signal. Your volume disk is retained even if your Spot instance is interrupted.
Benefits:
Risks and considerations:
Use spot instances for:
Selecting the optimal pricing model depends on your specific needs.
For maximum flexibility and reliability for short-term or unpredictable workloads, choose an on-demand instance.
For significant cost savings on long-term, stable workloads, and if you can make an upfront commitment, choose a savings plan instance.
For the lowest possible cost on fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads, choose a spot instance.
Consider your workload’s sensitivity to interruptions, your budget, the expected duration of your compute tasks, and data persistence strategies to make the most informed decision.
You can select your preferred pricing model directly from the Runpod console when configuring and deploying a new Pod.
Open the Pods page in the Runpod console and select Deploy.
Configure your Pod (see Create a Pod).
Under Instance Pricing, select one of the following options:
Review your Pod’s configuration details, including the terms of the selected pricing model. The combined cost of the Pod’s GPU and storage will be displayed during deployment under Pricing Summary.
Click Deploy On-Demand (or the equivalent deployment button). If you’ve selected a savings plan, the upfront cost will be charged to your Runpod credits, and your Pod will begin deploying with the discounted rate active.
Runpod offers three types of storage for Pods::
You are not charged for storage if the host machine is down or unavailable from the public internet.
Container and disk volume storage will be included in your Pod’s displayed hourly cost during deployment.
Runpod is not designed as a long-term cloud storage system. Storage is provided to support compute tasks. We recommend regularly backing up critical data to your local machine or to a dedicated cloud storage provider.
When you stop a Pod, you will no longer be charged for the Pod’s hourly GPU cost, but will continue to be charged for the Pod’s disk volume at a rate of $0.20 per GB per month.
You can monitor your active savings plans, including their associated Pods, commitment periods, and expiration dates, by visiting the dedicated Savings plans section in your Runpod console. General Pod usage and billing can be tracked through the Billing section.