You're burning runway. You can't hire an infra team yet. You need GPU compute that works like SaaS — not a procurement process.
Reserved instances mean you pay whether you use them or not. Spot interruptions break your demo at the worst moment. On-demand pricing on the big clouds is punishing for small teams.
A 4-minute container cold start is a dead demo. Users leave. Investors notice. Every second of latency between 'try it' and 'it works' is a conversion you don't get back.
Kubernetes clusters, CUDA drivers, network configuration. You didn't hire for that. You shouldn't have to spend two days debugging before you can train a model.
You start on the cheapest option and then discover migration costs more than staying. Proprietary APIs, custom runtimes, no standard egress. The trap is set at signup.
Start serverless. Move to reserved capacity when your usage stabilizes. Never pay for infrastructure that's sitting idle.
No configuration. API key, model, go. H100s ready in under 90 seconds. Pay per second. Stop when you stop.
Once you have predictable workload patterns, reserve capacity and lock in 30–50% savings. No cliff edge to migrate — same API, same infrastructure.
Standard REST API. VPC peering if you want it. Bring your own container. We don't build walls to keep customers in.
Most GPU clouds bill by the hour. That means you pay for 59 minutes of idle time after a 1-minute training run. Aircloud bills by the second. Your costs track your actual usage.
View GPU pricingWhat you get
Directional comparison. Verified as of Q1 2025. Always check current docs.
| Aircloud | Lambda Labs | Modal | RunPod | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billing granularity | Per-second | Per-hour | Per-second | Per-minute |
| Cold start | < 90s | Minutes | ~5–30s* | < 60s |
| Scale to zero | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| VM-level isolation | Yes (Trusted tier) | No | No | No |
| Enterprise contracts | Yes | Limited | No | No |
| No minimums | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spot with auto-checkpoint | Yes | No | No | Limited |
* Modal cold start varies significantly by model size and container image. Aircloud < 90s applies to standard serverless endpoints.
Early access is open. Sign up, get an API key, and start running inference in minutes — no sales call required.