#1
Salad
Distributed inference cloud — RTX 3090/4090 from $0.03/h
- Absurdly cheap — RTX 3090 from $0.03/h
- Massive horizontal scale (1000+ nodes)
Price accurate?
RTX 3090 cloud comparison · May 2026
Best RTX 3090 Cloud Providers 2026
The budget consumer ML GPU — NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB from $0.03/h. 4 clouds compared. Best for Stable Diffusion fine-tuning, small LLM inference and research.
The RTX 3090 market in May 2026
The NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB is the ultimate consumer GPU for budget ML in 2026 — a card that costs under $0.50/h on-demand and still packs 24 GB GDDR6X with ~71 TFLOPS BF16. For Stable Diffusion fine-tuning, small LLM inference (up to ~13B parameters with quantization), and research-scale experiments, it's hard to beat on raw cost.
Across 4 GPU clouds — RunPod, Vast.ai, TensorDock and Salad — RTX 3090 pricing spans a remarkable $0.03–$0.50/h. The $0.03/h price on Salad represents community-contributed GPUs on spot pricing; RunPod Secure Cloud at $0.50/h offers the most reliable uptime. This 16× price spread reflects the difference between spot interruptibility and guaranteed on-demand.
Consumer ML economics are unbeatable. For fine-tuning Stable Diffusion XL, running Whisper at scale, or prototyping with quantized 13B LLMs, an RTX 3090 at $0.10–$0.20/h outperforms every other dollar-for-dollar option. The limitation is VRAM: 24 GB means large models (34B+) require quantization, and multi-GPU NVLink is not available on cloud RTX 3090 setups.
| Provider | Starting Price | Top GPUs | Highlights | Rating | CTA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salad | from $0.03/h | RTX 3090, RTX 4090, RTX 3080 ≤24GB |
| ★★★★☆ | View pricing |
| Vast.ai Editor's Choice | from $0.10/h | RTX 3090, RTX 4090, A100 ≤80GB |
| ★★★★☆ | View pricing |
| RunPod Editor's Choice | from $0.20/h | RTX 3090, RTX 4090, A100 80GB ≤80GB |
| ★★★★★ | View pricing |
| TensorDock | from $0.21/h | RTX 4090, RTX 3090, A100 80GB ≤80GB |
| ★★★★☆ | View pricing |
#2
Vast.ai
Cheapest GPU cloud — peer-to-peer marketplace for budget training
- Absolute cheapest GPU compute available
- Widest GPU variety including consumer cards
Price accurate?
#3
RunPod
Best value GPU cloud — huge selection, community + secure cloud
- Cheapest community GPUs from $0.20/h
- Massive GPU variety including H100
Price accurate?
#4
TensorDock
Marketplace GPU cloud — RTX 4090 from $0.21/h, H100 from $1.99/h
- Among the cheapest H100 access in 2026
- Wide host network = better availability
Price accurate?
Frequently Asked Questions
Which cloud has the cheapest RTX 3090 in 2026?
Salad offers RTX 3090 from $0.03/h on its community cloud — contributed by individuals running consumer GPUs. This is spot pricing: expect interruptions. For reliable on-demand, RunPod Secure Cloud at ~$0.50/h or TensorDock at $0.10–$0.20/h are the most dependable options.
RTX 3090 vs RTX 4090 — which should I rent for Stable Diffusion?
RTX 4090 (24 GB GDDR6X, ~165 TFLOPS FP32) is roughly 2× faster than RTX 3090 (~35 TFLOPS FP32) for SDXL generation but costs 3–5× more per hour. For high-throughput SDXL production, 4090 wins. For fine-tuning experiments, learning, and low-volume inference where budget matters, RTX 3090 at $0.10/h is the better choice.
What is the largest LLM I can run on an RTX 3090?
24 GB GDDR6X fits models up to ~13B parameters in FP16, or up to ~34B in 4-bit quantization (via llama.cpp or bitsandbytes). For single-GPU inference, Llama-3 8B in FP16 or Mistral 7B are the practical sweet spots. Llama-3 13B in 4-bit runs comfortably with room for a KV cache.
Can I fine-tune Stable Diffusion on an RTX 3090?
Yes — 24 GB VRAM is the sweet spot for SDXL fine-tuning with DreamBooth or LoRA. Standard SDXL DreamBooth requires 18–22 GB VRAM; the 3090 handles it with 2–6 GB to spare. For SDXL + ControlNet fine-tuning, 24 GB is often the minimum recommended. RunPod and Vast.ai are popular choices for this workflow.
RTX 3090 vs A40 — which has better value for ML?
A40 (48 GB GDDR6) wins on VRAM — double the 3090 — enabling larger models and multi-model workflows. RTX 3090 wins on price: $0.10–$0.20/h vs $0.39–$0.99/h for A40. For workloads that fit in 24 GB, RTX 3090 is 2–4× cheaper. For anything requiring 25 GB+ VRAM or ECC memory, A40 is the right step up.
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