How the billing unit changes a cheap GPU price

The provider measures how long your machine was on, rounds it up to its billing unit, and applies the hourly rate. By the second, ten minutes and twenty seconds are charged as that. By the minute, eleven minutes. By the hour, sixty.

Nothing about the hourly figure tells you which applies. It is a separate line on the pricing page, or in the billing documentation, or nowhere.

Take two listings for the same card. One is a fifth cheaper per hour and bills by the hour. The other bills by the second. For a twenty-minute job, the first charges a full hour at its lower rate. The second charges a third of an hour at its higher one.

The second bill is less than half the first. Over a week of short sessions the gap is most of the spend.

Two details hide behind the unit. Some providers bill by the second with a minimum charge for each start, often the first minute. And a GPU machine takes minutes to boot before you can use it.

Whether boot minutes are billed is rarely stated. Start the smallest machine, wait until you can log in, stop it, and read the charge.

Development loops, evaluation runs and agents that start and stop machines many times a day gain most. So does inference that scales up and down with traffic.

A training run that lasts days gains least. There the hourly rate is nearly the whole bill, and the rate is what to compare.

Look for the words per second, per minute or hourly. If the provider does not say, treat the price as hourly until a bill shows otherwise. Write the unit beside the price before you compare two listings.

Runcrate bills by the second on most GPUs and by the minute on a few. Booting is never billed. One prepaid balance pays for GPUs, models and storage, so the unit you read is the unit you are charged in.

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