For renters · Updated
Renting a GPU vs buying one: a simple way to decide
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Short answer: rent if you need a big card now and then. Buy if you'd use it most days for years, or need your data to stay on your own machine. The deciding number is how many hours you'll really use it.
Work out your break-even point
Buying costs the price of the card, minus what you could sell it for later, plus electricity for every hour you use it. Renting costs the hourly price for every hour you use it. So renting is cheaper as long as you use the card for fewer hours than:
(price paid − resale value) ÷ (hourly rental price − your electricity per hour)
An example, with made-up purchase numbers to show the sum: say a card costs you $1,000 and you could sell it for $500 in two years, so owning costs $500 before electricity. Compare renting an RTX 4090 at about $0.428 an hour (the price we expect at launch) with owning one that draws about 510 W with the rest of the PC, at 15¢ per kWh (roughly 8¢ an hour):
- $500 ÷ ($0.43 − $0.08) ≈ 1,400 hours.
- That's about 2 hours a day, every day, for two years.
Use it less than that, and renting is cheaper. Put in your own numbers: what the card costs where you live, what it might sell for, your electricity price, and the hourly price of the size you'd rent.
Things the sum leaves out
In favor of renting
- No big payment up front, and nothing to sell later.
- A bigger card when you need one. Rent 24 GB or 32 GB for a big job, a smaller card for small ones. How much memory you need
- No setup: on KernelMachine you pick a notebook, image maker or chat app, and it opens in your browser.
- No noise or heat at home.
In favor of buying
- Privacy. On a rented home machine, the owner could see your data. Keep secrets on hardware you own.
- Always there. A rented card of the size you want may not be free right away.
- Your files stay. On KernelMachine, a rental's files are deleted when it stops, so you set up again each time.
- No meter running. Leave a job going overnight without watching the cost. (Renting with a time limit gets close: you see the most it can cost before you start.)
- Games, if you play.
A middle path
Rent first, to learn what size you actually need. If you find yourself renting most days, the sum above will tell you when buying starts to pay. And if you do buy, the card can earn while you're not using it. What hosting really earns
Rental prices by card · How renting works