GPU rental prices compared: H100, A100, RTX 4090 and more (Oct 2026)

Lantern Works — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:20:22 +0000

TL;DR: Among the providers Lantern Works tracks, the cheapest listed on-demand rates on Oct 27, 2026 were $1.99/hr for an H100 80 GB (RunPod Community Cloud), $1.09/hr for an A100 80 GB (Thunder Compute) and $0.34/hr for an RTX 4090 (RunPod Community Cloud). The data is open JSON, and there's a read-only MCP server so an agent can query it: uvx lantern-works-deals-mcp (MIT, no API key).

"Cheapest" in this post always means cheapest among tracked providers, not the whole market.

The problem

Comparing GPU rentals means juggling hourly vs. per-second vs. monthly billing, per-GPU vs. per-server pricing, community vs. secure tiers, and marketplace prices that move by the minute, across many tabs.

Cheapest tracked rate per GPU (checked Oct 27, 2026)

50 rates from 7 providers: 99Stack Cloud, Lambda, Modal, RunPod, Thunder Compute, Ucartz and Vast.ai. Prices are per GPU, on-demand, from each vendor's own pricing page.

GPU	Cheapest tracked rate	Provider (tier)	Tracked rates
H100 80 GB	$1.99/hr	RunPod (Community Cloud, H100 PCIe)	10
H200 141 GB	$3.59/hr	RunPod (Community Cloud)	3
A100 80 GB	$1.09/hr	Thunder Compute (on-demand)	10
L40S 48 GB	$0.79/hr	RunPod (Community Cloud)	3
RTX 5090 32 GB	$0.69/hr	RunPod (Community Cloud)	3
RTX 4090 24 GB	$0.34/hr	RunPod (Community Cloud)	4
RTX A6000 48 GB	$0.33/hr	RunPod (Community Cloud)	4

Each rate has the vendor quote it came from, a source URL and a check date. Live tables: GPU hub · full price comparison · H100 page.

A few things the table doesn't show:

Held out, not ranked: TensorDock's public pricing table says it was last updated July 24, 2024, so it's excluded until re-checked. Vast.ai's A100 SXM 80 GB had only 3 qualifying marketplace offers on Oct 27, under our 5-offer minimum, so it's held too.
Marketplace prices move: Vast.ai's RTX 4090 figure ($0.51/hr) is the median of live offers from Vast-verified hosts, not a fixed list price.
Lowest hourly ≠ lowest cost per job: compare VRAM and speed for your workload. Totals exclude storage, egress and taxes. Confirm on the vendor page before you pay.

Price your own hours

GPU cost calculator: pick a GPU and monthly hours to sort tracked providers by estimated monthly cost.
Stack optimizer: enter monthly usage (pages scraped, proxy GB, emails, search queries, GPU hours) to get the cheapest suitable plan among tracked providers. Prices a vendor doesn't publish show as unknown and are never estimated.

Use it from code

curl -s https://thelanternworks.com/api/v1/gpu-prices.json | jq '.rates | sort_by(.hourly_equiv_usd) | .[0:5]'

Other feeds: /api/v1/deals.json and /api/v1/stack-pricing.json. There's also a standard-library-only price monitor that diffs snapshots for cron or GitHub Actions: https://github.com/connormatthewdouglas/agent-work-stack-deals/tree/main/examples/gpu-price-monitor

Use it from your agent

The MCP server (v0.3.2) is read-only, runs over stdio and has five tools: search_deals, compare_deals, get_deal, compare_gpu_prices, optimize_stack.

uvx lantern-works-deals-mcp
claude mcp add lantern-works-deals -- uvx lantern-works-deals-mcp

Setup for Cursor, Cline, VS Code, Claude Desktop and other clients: thelanternworks.com/install. There's also an agent skill: npx skills add connormatthewdouglas/agent-work-stack-deals.

Affiliate disclosure

Some listings are referral links, including RunPod and Thunder Compute, which hold most of the cheapest rows above. Lantern Works may earn a commission if you sign up through them; that never changes the price you pay. Referral links are flagged in the data (affiliate), and ranking is by estimated cost only, never by affiliate status.

What's missing

Tell us which providers or GPUs to add: https://github.com/connormatthewdouglas/agent-work-stack-deals/issues

SERP and screenshot APIs for AI agents: free tiers compared (verified Oct 2026)

Lantern Works — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:53:28 +0000

Disclosure: I run Lantern Works. Many listings (105 of 137) are affiliate/referral links; the rest are non-affiliate free tiers and vendor coupons. Affiliate status doesn't affect ordering.

Agents keep needing two boring things: search results and a picture of a web page. I compared the free options from vendor pricing pages. Anything not verified is marked as such.

Search / SERP APIs

Provider	Free option (verified on vendor page)
Bright Data	5,000 free credits/mo, no card (application required)
SerpApi	250 successful searches/mo on Free plan
Tavily	1,000 API credits every month
Exa	$10 credits/month + $10 onboarding bonus, no payment method; Search from $4/1k requests
APILayer, Scrapingdog, SERP-Tool	not verified

Rule of thumb: raw SERP APIs (SerpApi, Bright Data) for rank tracking; AI-search APIs (Tavily, Exa) for agent retrieval.

Screenshot / headless browser APIs

Provider	Free option (verified)
Browserbase	3 concurrent browsers, 1 browser hour, 1k Search+Fetch
Browserless	1k units/month, 2 concurrent browsers, no card
Hyperbrowser	5,000 free credits
Kernel	$5 free usage/mo
Steel	$30 one-time free usage (~300 browser hrs), 90-day validity
ScreenshotOne	100 free screenshots; Basic $17/mo for 2,000

Dedicated screenshot APIs are simpler; hosted browsers handle logins and multi-step flows.

For agents: the JSON feed

curl -s https://thelanternworks.com/deals.json | jq '.deals[] | select(.category=="search") | .title'
python3 query_deals.py --category unblock --max-price 20

No auth. Full tables: https://thelanternworks.com/compare/serp-api-comparison/ and https://thelanternworks.com/compare/screenshot-api-comparison/. Prices change, so check them at checkout.

DEV Community: Lantern Works