{"slug": "vast-ai", "name": "vast.ai", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 4, "warners": 0, "score": 2.978, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2025-12-06", "latest": "2026-08-26", "why": "p2p GPU rental marketplaces like vast.ai can offer much more economical options.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 0, "compare": 1, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "p2p GPU rental marketplaces like vast.ai can offer much more economical options.", "icon": true, "domain": "vast.ai", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://vast.ai", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["vast.ai", "Vast"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 791310544, "item_id": 49456909, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456909", "by": "girvo", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you're better off using Vast or Runpod or whatever to rent cloud compute. Much faster and cheap as hell", "excerpt": "I love my Spark-like, but even for training you're better off using Vast or Runpod or whatever to rent cloud compute. Much faster and cheap as hell, to be honest. I do set up my initial runs and likes like quantisation-aware-distillation on my Spark-like to test it out and get it working, so it has value! But its not \"worth\" it other than its fun hardware to tinker with, IMO.", "context": "has a Spark-like local machine", "use_case": "renting GPUs for training", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3-Flash"}, {"id": 783989506, "item_id": 48999344, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999344", "by": "reilly3000", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If speed were a priority I\u2019d propose be renting time on vast.ai or something.", "excerpt": "As a US citizen I have domicile over the data and a legal system that has some claws. We tend to enforce and celebrate IP whereas China openly scoffs at its premise. Frankly I don\u2019t trust any of them. Certainly not Anthropic after they refused to delete my Cowork session. Certainly not OpenAI with their duplicity. I\u2019m a Google workspace subscriber so I use Gemini, but only with logging disabled and for throwaway sear", "context": "", "use_case": "renting GPU time", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kimi Work"}, {"id": 777788914, "item_id": 48611807, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611807", "by": "anonym29", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "p2p GPU rental marketplaces like vast.ai can offer much more economical options.", "excerpt": "In that case, you don't want to be using Claude Code, which is more of a consumer product; you instead want to control the inference stack yourself. What you are looking for is structured output (you give the inference engine a JSON schema you define that the response must conform to) + a JSON schema validator that parses the output, checks if the response is valid JSON. If it is, you're good to go, if not, run the i", "context": "", "use_case": "GPU rental", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "girvo", "context": "has a Spark-like local machine", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456909", "date": "2026-08-26"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["gpu rental", "renting gpus for training", "renting gpu time"], "compared": [], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449507", "title": "GLM-5.3-Flash", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981703", "title": "Kimi Work", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48610280", "title": "Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178163", "title": "NeocloudX: Trade Compute as a Commodity", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"compare": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 791310544, "item_id": 49456909, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456909", "by": "girvo", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you're better off using Vast or Runpod or whatever to rent cloud compute. Much faster and cheap as hell", "excerpt": "I love my Spark-like, but even for training you're better off using Vast or Runpod or whatever to rent cloud compute. Much faster and cheap as hell, to be honest. I do set up my initial runs and likes like quantisation-aware-distillation on my Spark-like to test it out and get it working, so it has value! But its not \"worth\" it other than its fun hardware to tinker with, IMO.", "context": "has a Spark-like local machine", "use_case": "renting GPUs for training", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3-Flash"}, {"id": 783989506, "item_id": 48999344, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999344", "by": "reilly3000", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If speed were a priority I\u2019d propose be renting time on vast.ai or something.", "excerpt": "As a US citizen I have domicile over the data and a legal system that has some claws. We tend to enforce and celebrate IP whereas China openly scoffs at its premise. Frankly I don\u2019t trust any of them. Certainly not Anthropic after they refused to delete my Cowork session. Certainly not OpenAI with their duplicity. I\u2019m a Google workspace subscriber so I use Gemini, but only with logging disabled and for throwaway sear", "context": "", "use_case": "renting GPU time", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kimi Work"}, {"id": 777788914, "item_id": 48611807, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611807", "by": "anonym29", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "p2p GPU rental marketplaces like vast.ai can offer much more economical options.", "excerpt": "In that case, you don't want to be using Claude Code, which is more of a consumer product; you instead want to control the inference stack yourself. What you are looking for is structured output (you give the inference engine a JSON schema you define that the response must conform to) + a JSON schema validator that parses the output, checks if the response is valid JSON. If it is, you're good to go, if not, run the i", "context": "", "use_case": "GPU rental", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?"}, {"id": 738850625, "item_id": 46178164, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178164", "by": "jack_nclx", "date": "2025-12-06", "stance": "compare", "quote": "We use an orderbook model rather than a market model like Vast", "excerpt": "Compute is a commodity, and it needs a standard benchmark price to trade futures on. I'm building out a \"Henry Hub\" for compute, where anybody can upload their GPUs and rent for spot or forward, under minimum standards. We use an orderbook model rather than a market model like Vast -- if the lowest offer is 0.3/hr and you post 0.29/hr, you get the next rent. You can rent out some nodes now or contact me at jack_at_ne", "context": "", "use_case": "GPU rental", "switched_from": "", "story": "NeocloudX: Trade Compute as a Commodity"}]}