Should you rent a cloud GPU or buy the card? This calculator answers it with live data: the hourly rate below is the cheapest current on-demand price we track across providers for each GPU, and the electricity estimate uses the card's real TDP. Enter how much you'd actually use it and what the card costs to buy — you get the break-even point.
Pick a GPU and enter a purchase price to see the verdict.
Break-even = purchase price ÷ (monthly cloud cost − monthly electricity). Owning also needs a host machine (CPU, PSU, cooling), and cards depreciate — so treat the break-even as optimistic for buying. Cloud rates are the cheapest live on-demand price we track; see the best-value rankings for the full table.
Cloud cost per month at a glance
Cheapest live on-demand rate per GPU and what a month costs at three usage levels — 40 h (evenings/weekends), 160 h (working hours), and 730 h (running 24/7). Data as of July 2026.
| GPU | $/hr | 40 h/mo | 160 h/mo | 24/7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Tesla T4 | $0.08 | $3 | $13 | $58 |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 | $0.12 | $5 | $19 | $88 |
| NVIDIA Tesla V100 | $0.13 | $5 | $21 | $95 |
| NVIDIA Tesla P4 | $0.16 | $6 | $26 | $117 |
| NVIDIA A2 | $0.22 | $9 | $35 | $161 |
| NVIDIA A30 | $0.25 | $10 | $40 | $183 |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 | $0.28 | $11 | $45 | $204 |
| NVIDIA RTX A6000 | $0.30 | $12 | $48 | $219 |
| NVIDIA A40 | $0.30 | $12 | $48 | $219 |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 | $0.34 | $14 | $54 | $248 |
| NVIDIA L4 | $0.39 | $16 | $62 | $285 |
| NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada | $0.47 | $19 | $75 | $343 |
| NVIDIA A16 | $0.47 | $19 | $75 | $343 |
| NVIDIA L40S | $0.55 | $22 | $88 | $402 |
| NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada | $0.76 | $30 | $122 | $555 |
The pattern is consistent: light or bursty usage almost always favours renting (you pay only for hours used, and can jump to newer GPUs any time), while sustained 24/7 workloads on consumer cards can pay the card off within months — if you already have a machine to host it and cheap power. Data-center GPUs (H100/H200-class) are rarely worth buying outright: acquisition cost, hosting, and interconnect put ownership out of reach of the rental math above.