SaladCloud vs PowerGPU at a glance
SaladCloud
Distributed consumer GPUs on volunteer PCs — the lowest hourly prices, with the trade-offs
PowerGPU
Fixed prices at market median × 0.70, crypto only, verified datacenters
| SaladCloud | PowerGPU | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Usage-based per node-hour | Per second, no minimum, price locked at deploy |
| Payment | Card | Crypto only — USDT (TRC-20/ERC-20), BTC, XMR, LTC, ETH, TRX, SOL |
| Identity | Card | Email + password. No KYC, no card, no stored IP addresses |
| Free credit | None | None — every hour is ≥30% under the market median instead |
| Cheaper tier | Priority tiers (batch vs high) | Interruptible flat −50% (no auction) · reserved −35% (3+ months) |
| Regions | Distributed residential nodes worldwide | 32 regions on 5 continents, verified datacenters only |
| Minimums | None | None — 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price |
| Storage | Ephemeral only — no persistent volumes | $0.08/GB/month NVMe, volumes survive instances |
| Egress | Included | $0.01/GB in and out, every region |
| Access | Containers only, no SSH; API and portal | Containers or full KVM VMs, SSH, Jupyter, REST API, CLI, Python SDK |
SaladCloud column: as published on salad.com on 2026-09-03. Details change — verify before you decide.
SaladCloud vs PowerGPU prices, GPU by GPU
Public on-demand list prices per GPU-hour on SaladCloud's pricing page (2026-09-03) against PowerGPU's fixed rates today — every PowerGPU price is the public marketplace median × 0.70, rounded down, re-checked weekly.
| GPU | SaladCloud list | PowerGPU on-demand | PowerGPU interruptible | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 5090 consumer node, 32 GB | $0.25 | $0.318 | $0.159 | +27% on PowerGPU |
| RTX 4090 consumer node, 24 GB | $0.16 | $0.262 | $0.131 | +64% on PowerGPU |
Configurations differ (node sizes, tiers, regions); the note beside each card says which SaladCloud price is quoted. Negative differences mean SaladCloud is cheaper on that card.
When to stay with SaladCloud
- Your job is stateless, embarrassingly parallel and tolerant of nodes disappearing mid-task (batch image generation, transcription farms).
- The absolute lowest hourly price on a 4090/5090 matters more than reliability, and your container survives cold restarts.
Why teams switch to PowerGPU
- Honest math: SaladCloud is cheaper per hour on the RTX 4090 ($0.16 vs our on-demand rate) — but PowerGPU interruptible capacity on the same card is priced below Salad's rate, on datacenter hardware.
- SSH, Jupyter, persistent volumes, full VMs and datacenter cards (H100, H200, L40S) — none of which exist on a residential node network.
- Deterministic hardware: the machine you deploy on is the machine you get, with a known CPU, RAM, disk and uplink.
- Crypto payments with no KYC.
Switching from SaladCloud: what maps to what
| On SaladCloud | On PowerGPU |
|---|---|
| Container group on consumer nodes | Interruptible instance on a datacenter machine, flat −50% |
| Ephemeral storage | Instance disk that survives stop/start + volumes |
| Job queue / batch priority | Interruptible queue with auto-requeue and volume checkpoints |
pip install powergpu
export POWERGPU_API_KEY=pg_live_… # console → API keys
powergpu launch --gpu rtx-5090 --template pytorch --disk 100 --volume data:/data
# ✓ instance i-52ab77c1 running (24.1s) · $0.318/hr · per second
powergpu stop i-52ab77c1 # billing ends this secondData moves the boring way: rsync or rclone from your SaladCloud machine to a PowerGPU volume, which then mounts on every future instance in seconds. Templates for PyTorch, vLLM, ComfyUI and Ollama are official images; anything else runs from its OCI reference.
A real month, costed
| Scenario | SaladCloud | PowerGPU |
|---|---|---|
| 1× RTX 5090, 730 hours on-demand | $183 | $232 |
| 1× RTX 5090, 8 h/day × 20 days | $40 | $51 |
| Same 160 hours, PowerGPU interruptible | — | $25 |
| 500 GB of storage, one month | Ephemeral only — no persistent volumes | $40 |
Run your own schedule through the cost calculator — it adds storage and bandwidth and compares against the marketplace median.
SaladCloud alternative: FAQ
Is SaladCloud cheaper than PowerGPU?
Per hour on consumer cards, yes: Salad lists the RTX 4090 at $0.16/hr and the RTX 5090 at $0.25/hr (checked 2026-09-03). PowerGPU's interruptible RTX 4090 and 5090 are priced at half of on-demand — below Salad on the 4090 — on datacenter hardware with SSH and persistent storage. On datacenter GPUs there is no comparison: Salad does not offer them.
Can I get SSH access on SaladCloud?
No — Salad runs containers on residential nodes without shell access or persistent disks. Every PowerGPU instance has SSH, mapped ports with TLS, optional Jupyter and volumes.
Which is more reliable?
PowerGPU on-demand instances run on Tier-III datacenter machines with a 99.9% SLA; Salad nodes are volunteer PCs that can leave at any moment. Salad is designed around that churn; stateful or latency-sensitive work is not.
Try the switch for the price of a coffee
Top up $30 in USDT or Monero, deploy the same image you run on SaladCloud, and benchmark it. No card, no KYC, per-second billing — stop it the minute you are done.
SaladCloud and its logo are trademarks of their owner, used here only to identify the compared service; PowerGPU is not affiliated with SaladCloud. NVIDIA GPU names are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
