FluidStack vs RunPod - GPU Provider Comparison (March 2026)
Head-to-head comparison of FluidStack and RunPod. 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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FluidStack
Distributed GPU cloud for AI training and inference
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RunPod
The cloud built for AI — deploy and scale GPU workloads from serverless inference to instant multi-node clusters on demand.
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| Overview | ||
| Trustpilot Rating | 4.7 | 3.8 |
| Headquarters | United Kingdom | United States |
| Provider Type | IaaS | GPU-Focused |
| Best For | Large-scale AI training frontier model development inference at scale sovereign AI deployments | Training Inference Fine-tuning Batch Rendering |
| GPU Hardware | ||
| GPU Models | NVIDIA L40S (48GB) NVIDIA A100 PCIe (40GB) NVIDIA A100 SXM (80GB) NVIDIA H100 SXM (80GB) NVIDIA H200 SXM (141GB) NVIDIA B200 SXM (192GB) NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 | B300 B200 H200 H100 SXM H100 PCIe H100 NVL MI300X A100 SXM A100 PCIe RTX 5090 RTX PRO 6000 L40S L40 RTX 6000 Ada RTX 5000 Ada RTX A6000 RTX A5000 RTX 4090 RTX 4080 SUPER RTX 4080 RTX 4070 Ti RTX 3090 Ti RTX 3090 RTX 3080 Ti RTX 3080 RTX 3070 A40 A30 A2 L4 |
| Max VRAM (GB) | 192 | 288 |
| Max GPUs/Instance | 8 | 8 |
| Interconnect | InfiniBand | NVLink |
| Pricing | ||
| Starting Price ($/hr) | $1.30/hr | $0.06/hr |
| Billing Granularity | Per-hour | Per-second |
| Spot/Preemptible | N/A | 1 |
| Reserved Discounts | Yes (30-day minimum, 20-40% off) | 15-29% (1-month to 1-year plans) |
| Free Credits | Limited (by request for qualifying use cases) | $5-$500 bonus after first $10 spend |
| Egress Fees | None (zero egress fees) | Free |
| Storage | On-node NVMe storage included, attachable filesystems via API | Container/Volume ($0.10/GB/mo), Idle Volume ($0.20/GB/mo), Network Storage ($0.07/GB/mo 1TB) |
| Infrastructure | ||
| Regions | Canada, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, United States (expanding) | 31 global regions |
| Uptime SLA | 15-min response SLA | 99.99% |
| Developer Experience | ||
| Frameworks | PyTorch Kubernetes Slurm Pyxis/Enroot CUDA NVIDIA GPU Operator | PyTorch TensorFlow JAX ONNX CUDA |
| Docker Support | N/A | 1 |
| SSH Access | N/A | 1 |
| Jupyter Notebooks | N/A | 1 |
| API / CLI | N/A | 1 |
| Setup Time | Under 5 minutes | Instant |
| Kubernetes Support | N/A | 0 |
| Business Terms | ||
| Min Commitment | None | None |
| Compliance | SOC 2 ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II |