DigitalOcean vs Vast.ai - GPU Provider Comparison (March 2026)
Head-to-head comparison of DigitalOcean and Vast.ai. Check max funding, profit splits, daily and overall drawdown rules, leverage, tradable assets, payout frequency, payment and payout methods, trading permissions and KYC restrictions before you buy a challenge. Data refreshed March 2026.
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DigitalOcean
Simple, scalable GPU cloud for AI/ML
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Vast.ai
Instant GPUs. Transparent Pricing.
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| Overview | ||
| Trustpilot Rating | 4.6 | 4.4 |
| Headquarters | United States | United States |
| Provider Type | IaaS | GPU Marketplace |
| Best For | AI/ML training & fine-tuning AI inference LLM deployment computer vision startups & SMBs | Training Inference Fine-tuning Batch Processing AI Research LLM Serving |
| GPU Hardware | ||
| GPU Models | NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada (20GB) NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada (48GB) NVIDIA L40S (48GB) AMD Instinct MI300X (192GB) NVIDIA HGX H100 (80GB) NVIDIA HGX H200 (141GB) | B200 H200 H100 SXM H100 NVL A100 SXM A100 PCIe RTX 5090 RTX 5080 RTX 5070 Ti RTX 6000 Pro RTX 6000 Ada RTX 4500 Ada RTX A6000 RTX A5000 RTX A4000 L40S L40 A40 A10 RTX 4090 RTX 4080 RTX 4070 Ti RTX 4070 RTX 4060 Ti RTX 4060 RTX 3090 Ti RTX 3090 RTX 3080 Ti RTX 3080 RTX 3070 Ti RTX 3070 Tesla V100 Tesla T4 A2 GTX 1080 |
| Max VRAM (GB) | 192 | 192 |
| Max GPUs/Instance | 8 | 8 |
| Interconnect | NVLink | NVLink, InfiniBand |
| Pricing | ||
| Starting Price ($/hr) | $0.76/hr | $0.06/hr |
| Billing Granularity | Per-second | Per-second |
| Spot/Preemptible | N/A | 1 |
| Reserved Discounts | Yes (12-month) | Up to 50% (1-6 month reserved) |
| Free Credits | $200 free credit for 60 days | Small test credit on signup |
| Egress Fees | Included (10-15 TB pooled), $0.01/GiB overage | Varies by host ($/TB) |
| Storage | 500-720 GiB NVMe boot (included), 5 TiB NVMe scratch on larger configs, Volumes at $0.10/GiB/mo | Varies by host ($/GB/hr, charged while instance exists) |
| Infrastructure | ||
| Regions | New York (NYC2), Toronto (TOR1), Atlanta (ATL1), Richmond (RIC1), Amsterdam (AMS3) | 500+ locations, 40+ data centers |
| Uptime SLA | 99% | No formal SLA (host reliability scores visible) |
| Developer Experience | ||
| Frameworks | PyTorch TensorFlow Jupyter Miniconda CUDA ROCm Hugging Face | PyTorch TensorFlow CUDA vLLM ComfyUI |
| Docker Support | N/A | 1 |
| SSH Access | N/A | 1 |
| Jupyter Notebooks | N/A | 1 |
| API / CLI | N/A | 1 |
| Setup Time | Under 60 seconds | Seconds |
| Kubernetes Support | N/A | 0 |
| Business Terms | ||
| Min Commitment | None | None |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II SOC 3 HIPAA (with BAA) CSA STAR Level 1 | SOC 2 Type 2 HIPAA GDPR CCPA |