Help for renters

Starting a rental

Credit, picking a task and a card, and what you pay for.

KernelMachine is preparing an invite-only beta; no launch date is set. This describes how it works at launch. Join the waitlist

Before you start: three things

• Files are deleted when a rental stops. Download what you need first. How
• Unused rentals stop by themselves after 60 minutes, with an email at 30 minutes. What counts as using it
• You pay only for time that works: from when your app is ready, by the second, never while the machine is offline.

1. Sign in and get credit

Sign in with Google, GitHub or a link sent to your email. There's no password.

• Free credit: new accounts that sign in with Google or GitHub get $5 to try it, once per person. GitHub accounts need to be about a month old. Free credit comes from a monthly budget, so when this month's is used up, new accounts get none until next month. Email-link accounts don't get free credit.
• Paid credit: add $25, $50 or $100 on your account page, by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. A new account can add up to $50 in total until its first top-up is a week old.
• Free credit is used first. Credit never expires, and unused paid credit can go back to your card any time. How

2. Pick what you want to do

• Notebook: Jupyter with PyTorch, for code, training and courses.
• Image maker: ComfyUI, for Stable Diffusion, Flux and other image models.
• Chat model: Open WebUI with Ollama, for open models like Llama, Qwen or Mistral. It starts with no models: type one's name, such as llama3.1:8b, in the model menu at the top and pick Download "llama3.1:8b".
• Fine-tuning: Jupyter with Unsloth, for training open models on your own data, and vLLM, for serving them.

Browser rentals use these four templates. Established accounts can submit custom-image jobs on opted-in data-center machines, subject to availability. Job requirements.

3. Pick a size, or a card by name

We suggest a size for what you picked: enough card memory for it. Sizes go by the card's memory, which decides what fits, and each rental is one card. Pick a bigger size if your model needs it.

Then choose one of these:

• Cheapest: the lowest price per hour among available cards of that size.
• A card: a card model by name, such as an RTX 4090. Each shows how fast it is next to an RTX 3090.

Every card of one model costs the same on every machine. Prices here are what we expect at launch; the rent page shows what's available right now, or says none is. Not sure which size? How much memory you need.

4. Choose how long

Under How long?, pick until you stop it, 1, 3 or 8 hours, or a day. With a limit, the cost box shows the most the rental can cost, and it stops by itself once that much time is used (counted as it's billed, from ready). We email you 10 minutes before. On the rental's page you can add an hour or three, or remove the limit. From a terminal: km rent --for 3h.

5. Click Start

We pick the machine: one with the card you chose that passed our automatic checks (and, for most hosts, a 48-hour trial). Top hosts are offered rentals first. If no card like that is free, we say so; choose another or come back later.

The rental's page shows the card and its hourly price, which stays the same for the whole rental, even if it moves to another machine. While it gets ready, the page shows each step (downloading the app, preparing your workspace, checking the card, starting the app) and refreshes by itself. If the card doesn't answer inside your rental, it moves to another machine and you pay nothing. Getting ready is free, so if the price isn't what you wanted, stop it before it's ready and you pay nothing. If it isn't ready within 20 minutes, it ends and you pay nothing.

How billing works

• From "ready", by the second. Billing starts when your app answers, not when you click Start.
• Ten minutes at a time. We set aside money for the next 10 minutes as you go. At the end of each 10 minutes you're charged only for the seconds that worked; the rest goes back to your balance.
• Never while the machine is offline. Time the host's machine is out of contact isn't charged. After 5 minutes, your rental moves to another card of the same model with its last save, and we email you. You don't pay for the work lost since that save. More
• You need credit for 10 minutes at a time. About 5 minutes before each paid 10 minutes ends, we set aside the next 10. When your credit covers 30 minutes or less, we email you once. If it can't cover the next 10 minutes, the rental keeps running to the end of the time you've paid for, then stops and its files are deleted. Credit added before then keeps it going.

Your data on someone else's machine

Rentals run on other people's PCs, mostly at home. Our terms forbid hosts from looking at your rental, but the owner of a PC could. Don't put passwords, keys or private data on a rental.

Updated October 8, 2026. Questions? Email support@kernelmachine.com.