Official JANCTION Render: https://render.janction.jp
Disclosure: this post comes from the team behind JANCTION Render, one of the six options below. The laptop and JANCTION Render numbers are our own measurements. For the other services we describe how they charge and what they ask of you, and link to them instead of quoting prices that change.
Short answer: if waiting costs you nothing, the free routes are your own computer and SheepIt's volunteer farm. If you want the minute back the same day without setting up a machine, you pay for GPU time somewhere. On JANCTION Render, one minute of a simple scene at 1920x1080 and 128 samples comes to about 7,800 GPU-seconds, about 780 JPY (around $5), and a heavier scene such as Blender's Classroom demo to about 1,290 JPY (around $8).
What "one minute" means
At 24 fps, one minute is 1,440 frames. Every option below comes down to how long one frame takes, times 1,440, and who pays for that time. Resolution and Cycles samples move the number more than anything else, so settle them before comparing: denoising with fewer samples often looks the same as many samples without it.
1. Your own computer first (free, slow)
Before paying anyone, make sure Cycles uses the GPU you already have: Edit > Preferences > System > Cycles Render Devices, then Metal on Apple silicon Macs, HIP on recent AMD GPUs, oneAPI on Intel Arc, CUDA or OptiX on NVIDIA, and set Render Properties > Device to GPU Compute. For drafts, EEVEE is much faster than Cycles.
What it costs in time, measured on a simple scene (a rotating cube) on a laptop with a Core Ultra 9 386H: 20.0 seconds per frame on the CPU at 1920x1080 and 128 samples, so about 8 hours for the minute, and 6.6 seconds per frame at 1280x720 and 64 samples, about 2.6 hours. The same laptop's GeForce RTX 5070 Ti took 6.0 and 2.5 seconds per frame: about 2.4 hours and 1 hour. These are single frames multiplied by 1,440; a real scene with more geometry, textures and light bounces takes longer.
2. SheepIt Render Farm (free, you wait)
SheepIt is a free, community-run farm: your frames render on volunteers' computers, and letting your own machine render for others earns points that move your projects up the queue. It costs nothing but waiting. Your .blend is opened on other people's machines, so it suits personal projects better than client work under an NDA. https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com
3. Google Colab notebooks (free GPU when one is available)
Several open-source notebooks install Blender on a Colab GPU and render a .blend from your Google Drive. It is free when a GPU is available, but free-tier GPUs and session length are not guaranteed, long renders get disconnected, and you set up and watch each run. Read Colab's terms before relying on it.
4. Rent a GPU by the hour (RunPod, Vast.ai and similar)
You start a machine with a GPU, install Blender, upload the file, render, download and stop the machine. You pay for every hour the machine is on, including setup, uploads and the evening you forget to stop it, and everything on it is yours to manage.
5. Commercial render farms (GarageFarm, RebusFarm, Fox Renderfarm and others)
You upload the .blend through their site or plugin and they render on many machines at once, so a minute comes back fast. They charge by node-hour or GHz-hour, show an estimate before you start, and several offer trial credit. For heavy production scenes they are the strongest option; for a short one-off they can be more than you need.
6. A per-second GPU API (JANCTION Render)
JANCTION Render is a cloud GPU render farm for Blender that AI agents call as an MCP server or HTTP API, and that you can also call from a terminal or a script. You send a .blend, a bpy script or a 3D file (glTF / FBX / USD / OBJ), get a preview in seconds, then the frames or an MP4. You pay for the GPU-seconds actually used, 0.1 JPY per GPU-second.
Measured per frame on its GPU (from 24-frame batches, including Blender start-up and scene loading, so a long run comes out a little lower), times 1,440:
- simple scene, 1280x720, 64 samples: 2.46 GPU-seconds per frame, 3,542 GPU-seconds for the minute, about 354 JPY (about $2.2)
- simple scene, 1920x1080, 128 samples: 5.39 per frame, 7,762 for the minute, about 776 JPY (about $4.9)
- Blender's Classroom demo, 1920x1080, 128 samples with denoising: 8.93 per frame, 12,859 for the minute, about 1,286 JPY (about $8.1)
Dollar figures use 158 JPY per USD (ECB reference rate, 2026-10-09); charges are in JPY.
Each new key gets 100 JPY of GPU time with no card, and 400 JPY more after saving a card on a page that charges nothing (once per card), for 14 days. That covers the 720p minute above. After it, previews stay free up to 2 GPU-minutes a day and finals are paid from prepaid credit.
Limits worth knowing before you start: 1920x1080 on free time and up to 3840x2160 on prepaid credit; a job part is at most 240 frames, so the service splits a longer instruction into 240-frame parts and returns each part as its own file, which means a one-minute animation comes back as six MP4s to join; at most 10 GPU-hours per job; files are deleted 24 hours after last use (7 days for keys that have topped up). There are two GPUs, one of them shared with other work, so jobs wait in a queue when they are busy, and https://render.janction.jp/status shows the wait.
From a terminal:
pip install janction-render
janction-render preview minute.blend
janction-render estimate minute.blend --frames 1-240 --size 1920x1080
for s in 1 241 481 721 961 1201; do
janction-render render minute.blend --frames $s-$((s+239)) --output mp4 --wait
done
The first janction-render command makes a free key, the preview comes back in seconds, the estimate shows the GPU-seconds and the price before anything runs, and each render waits for its MP4 and downloads it.
From an AI agent: add https://render.janction.jp/mcp as a connector in Claude or ChatGPT, or run claude mcp add --transport http janction-render https://render.janction.jp/mcp in Claude Code, then ask for a preview of the scene and the minute.
Side by side
| Option | Money for the minute | Your effort | Time until you have it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Own laptop, CPU (simple scene, 1080p, 128 samples) | none | set and leave | about 8 hours |
| Own laptop, RTX 5070 Ti (same scene) | none | set and leave | about 2.4 hours |
| SheepIt | none (you earn points) | upload | depends on the queue and your points |
| Colab notebook | none on the free tier | set up and watch each run | disconnections on long runs |
| Hourly GPU rental | per hour the machine is on | run the machine yourself | as fast as the GPU you rent |
| Commercial farm | per node-hour or GHz-hour | upload through their site or plugin | fast, many machines at once |
| JANCTION Render | about 354 to 1,286 JPY (measured scenes above) | a command or a chat | queue when the GPUs are busy |
Measurements: https://render.janction.jp/benchmarks. Cost per frame and per animation: https://render.janction.jp/blender-render-cost. Prices: https://render.janction.jp/pricing. Checked on 2026-10-13.
Official JANCTION Render: https://render.janction.jp. Code and client: https://github.com/JasmyLab-JANCTION/janction-render
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