GPU rent vs buy calculator: how many hours a month before buying pays off.
Owning a GPU costs the same every month whether it works or not; renting costs nothing while it is idle. Put in your purchase quote, power price and expected hours, and compare with renting the same GPU here or at the market median.
Owning versus renting, per month.
At 500 hours a month, renting is cheaper.
- Owning: purchase, spread$866.67
- Owning: electricity$58.80
- Owning: hosting & ops$0.00
- Owning, per month$925.47
- Renting, per month$445.00
- Owning cost per GPU-hour worked$1.85
Rental at the hourly rate × hours worked, billed per minute here. Owning: (price × (1 + overhead) × (1 − resale)) ÷ months, plus watts × PUE × hours × price per kWh, plus hosting.
Every purchase number is an assumption — change it.
We publish rental prices, not purchase prices. The defaults describe one plausible H100 purchase so the page shows a worked example; your quote, your power contract and your utilisation are what decide.
- H100 purchase
- $30,000 per cardMiddle of the $25,000–$40,000 street range cited in our H100 price guide
- Server and setup
- 30% of the GPU priceChassis, CPUs, memory, networking and installation, per GPU
- Power
- 700 W at a PUE of 1.4, $0.12 per kWhThe card's published TDP; a full server draws more per GPU
- Life and resale
- 36 months, 20% resaleSet both to your own replacement cycle
- Hosting & operations
- $0 by defaultAdd colocation, staff time and maintenance if they apply
The same H100, rented
per GPU-hour- Spot here$0.55
- On-demand here$0.89
- Reserved here$0.65
- Median of 64 providers$2.50
Renting has no idle cost and no resale risk; a reserved term fixes the rate if the work is steady. Reserved capacity.
Renting or buying GPUs
Is it cheaper to rent or buy a GPU?
It depends on how many hours a month the GPU actually works. Owning has a fixed monthly cost (the purchase spread over its useful life, minus what you can resell it for) plus electricity; renting costs nothing when the GPU is idle. With the defaults on this page — an H100 bought for $30,000, amortised over 36 months — buying only wins above 1,122 hours a month against our on-demand rate. Change the inputs to your own quote.
What does the purchase price of a GPU include?
The card is not the whole bill: a server to put it in, networking, storage, setup and spares typically add a substantial share on top. The calculator applies that as a percentage of the GPU price; set it from your own quote.
How do I account for electricity?
Power draw × PUE (the data-centre overhead for cooling and distribution) × hours × price per kWh. The default power draw is the GPU's published TDP from our catalogue; a whole server draws more per GPU than the card alone.
What about the resale value?
A data-centre GPU keeps part of its value after three years. The calculator subtracts the resale percentage from the purchase before spreading it over the months you keep the card.
Why does utilisation matter so much?
Because an owned GPU costs money every month whether it runs or not, while a rented one is billed only while it runs — per minute here. A card busy 8 hours a day on weekdays works about 170 hours a month; one that trains around the clock works 730.
See also H100 price per hour across providers · LLM VRAM calculator · all prices.
Your first H100 for $0.55 an hour.
Prepaid in crypto, pay as you go: no card, no contract, no minimum commitment. Add credit, launch, stop whenever you want.
Billed per minute from the moment the instance is reachable. Minimum credit $30, no subscription.