What is the difference between Beam and Salad Cloud?

Beam and Salad Cloud are both cloud GPU providers offering different pricing models, features, and GPU availability. Use our comparison tool to see real-time pricing and feature differences.

Which is cheaper: Beam or Salad Cloud?

Pricing varies by GPU model and usage requirements. Check our real-time comparison table to find the best deals for your specific needs.

Can I switch between Beam and Salad Cloud?

Yes, both providers offer flexible cloud GPU services. However, consider factors like data transfer costs, setup time, and specific features when switching between providers.

How many GPU models are available for comparison?

We track pricing for 38 different GPU models across both Beam and Salad Cloud, with 0 models available from both providers.

Beam vs Salad Cloud

Compare GPU pricing between Beam and Salad Cloud. Find the best rates for AI training, inference, and ML workloads.

Beam

Provider 1

GPUs Available

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Salad Cloud

Provider 2

GPUs Available

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Comparison Overview

Total GPU Models

Beam GPUs

Salad Cloud GPUs

Direct Comparisons

Average Price Difference: $0.69/hour between comparable GPUs

GPU Pricing Comparison

Total GPUs: 38Both available: 2Beam: 3Salad Cloud: 37

Showing 15 of 38 GPUs

Last updated: 10/30/2026, 6:26:15 PM

GPU Model ↑	Beam Price	Salad Cloud Price	Price Diff ↕	Sources
GTX 1050 Ti 4GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.01/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1050 Ti 4GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.01/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1060 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1060 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1650 4GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.01/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1650 4GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.01/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1660 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1660 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1660 SUPER 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1660 SUPER 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
H100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Beam	$3.50/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Beam
H100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Beam $3.50/hour Updated: 10/27/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Beam
RTX 2060 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2060 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 2070 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2070 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 2080 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.05/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2080 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.05/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 2080 Ti 11GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.06/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2080 Ti 11GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.06/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3050 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.03/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3050 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.03/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3060 12GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.03/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3060 12GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.03/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3060 Ti 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.03/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3060 Ti 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.03/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3070 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.04/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3070 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.04/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3070 Ti 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.06/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3070 Ti 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.06/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API

GTX 1050 Ti 4GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.01/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1050 Ti 4GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.01/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1060 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1060 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1650 4GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.01/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1650 4GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.01/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1660 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1660 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
GTX 1660 SUPER 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
GTX 1660 SUPER 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
H100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Beam	$3.50/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Beam
H100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Beam $3.50/hour Updated: 10/27/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Beam
RTX 2060 6GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2060 6GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 2070 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.02/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2070 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.02/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 2080 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.05/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2080 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.05/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 2080 Ti 11GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.06/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 2080 Ti 11GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.06/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3050 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.03/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3050 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.03/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3060 12GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.03/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3060 12GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.03/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3060 Ti 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.03/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3060 Ti 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.03/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3070 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.04/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3070 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.04/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API
RTX 3070 Ti 8GB VRAM • Salad Cloud	Not Available	$0.06/hr★ Best	—	Salad API
RTX 3070 Ti 8GB VRAM • Not Available Salad Cloud $0.06/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Salad API

Features Comparison

Beam

Pay-per-millisecond Billing
Only charged when your code runs, no charges for cold starts or server spin-up
Sub-second Cold Starts
Memory snapshots and GPU checkpoint restore bring containers back in seconds, which Beam reports as up to 35x faster than a traditional cold boot
Secure Sandbox Environments
Run untrusted code safely in isolated environments for AI agents and code interpreters
Stateful, Persistent Runtimes
Pause and resume sessions while maintaining filesystem, memory, and running processes
Elastic GPU Scaling
Scale to zero when idle, burst to thousands of containers in seconds
Custom Docker Images
Bring your own Docker images for full environment control, including running the Docker daemon inside containers

Salad Cloud

Community Cloud
On-demand pool of idle consumer GPUs with nodes in 190+ countries, deployed onto through Salad Container Engine.
Salad Container Engine
Managed orchestration that schedules Docker containers onto nodes it does not control, isolates them behind a hypervisor, streams logs, and reallocates work when a node disappears.
Priority Tiers
High, Medium, Low, and Lowest tiers price the same GPU class differently so a workload can trade preemption risk for cost; High is never preempted by other workloads.
Salad Dedicated
Reserved bare metal and virtual machines on contract, starting with RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, quoted per allocation and term.
Private Cloud
Salad's orchestration stack licensed per deployment on hardware you already own, pooling idle workstation and server GPUs into a private OpenAI-compatible token service.
Managed APIs and Tooling
AI Gateway (an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for open-weight models, in closed beta), Transcription API, Recipes deployment templates, S4 temporary storage, Gateway Service residential IPs, and a Virtual Kubelet for Kubernetes.

Pros & Cons

Beam

Advantages

Pay-per-millisecond billing with no charges for cold starts
Ultrafast boot times with sub-second cold starts via memory snapshots
GPU selection spanning RTX 4090 through B200, plus InfiniBand cluster nodes
On-demand machines priced flat per machine, including vCPU, RAM, and NVMe storage

Considerations

Serverless GPUs other than the RTX 4090 require a committed-spend agreement
GPU container concurrency is capped on the lower plan tiers
Multi-node InfiniBand clusters are sales-only with no published pricing

Salad Cloud

Advantages

Aggregating idle consumer hardware gives some of the lowest published per-GPU-hour rates available
Per-second billing with no contracts or minimums; allocation, image download, and cold start are not billed
vCPU and RAM are included with every GPU class at no additional charge
Four priority tiers make interruptibility an explicit, priced choice per container group

Considerations

On-demand catalog is consumer RTX GPUs only — data center accelerators are not offered outside the contracted Dedicated product
Published GPU classes top out at 32 GB of VRAM, limiting the size of a model that fits on a single GPU
Nodes are individually owned machines that can disconnect at any time, so workloads must be stateless or retryable

Compute Services

Beam

Inference Endpoints

Deploy high-performance inference endpoints with custom models

Custom model hosting on GPU or CPU
Pre-loading models for fast response times

Sandboxes

Secure code execution environments for AI agents

Run untrusted LLM-generated code safely
Snapshot and restore complete system state

Task Queues

Run large-scale workloads with distributed processing

Audio processing pipelines
Data processing at scale

Salad Cloud

Salad Container Engine on Community Cloud

On-demand container orchestration across the distributed pool of idle consumer GPUs, with more than 40 GPU classes selectable by priority tier.

Salad Dedicated

Reserved bare metal and virtual machines on contract, separate from the on-demand community pool.

CPU-only container groups

Container groups with no GPU attached, billed per vCPU-hour and per GB of RAM per hour, running at the Lowest priority tier.

Pricing Options

Beam

Pay-per-millisecond

Serverless GPU, CPU, and sandbox usage billed by the millisecond with no minimum charges

Committed Spend

Serverless access to GPUs beyond the RTX 4090 is arranged through a committed-spend agreement

On-Demand Machines

Flat hourly price per machine that already includes the vCPU, RAM, and NVMe storage

Reserved Clusters

Multi-node InfiniBand clusters reserved monthly or yearly, quoted through sales

Bring Your Own Cloud

Per-vCPU and per-GB management fee on top of compute billed directly by your own cloud provider

Storage

Persistent volumes and snapshots included up to a capacity threshold, then billed per GB per month

Monthly Plans

Developer plan free with usage, Team plan with a monthly base fee plus usage, and a contact-sales Growth tier

Free Monthly Credits

All plans include monthly free credits that refresh each month

Volume Discounts

Discounts available for high monthly usage, arranged through sales

Salad Cloud

Per-second on-demand billing

Published per-GPU-hour rates billed by the second for the time each replica spends running; allocation, image download, and cold start are not charged, and vCPU and RAM are included.

Priority tiers

High, Medium, Low, and Lowest tiers price each GPU class differently - lower tiers cost less and are more interruptible, with Lowest intended for retryable batch work.

CPU-only container groups

Billed per vCPU-hour plus per GB of RAM per hour for container groups that need no GPU.

Volume discounts

Large deployments, long-running jobs, and committed spend are priced below list by sales.

Salad Dedicated contracts

Reserved bare metal and virtual machines quoted separately per allocation and term.

Private Cloud licensing

Licensed per deployment to run the orchestration stack on hardware you already own.

Getting Started

Beam

Get Started

1
Create an account
Sign up on the Beam platform to receive monthly free credits
2
Set up Python environment
Create a virtual environment and install the Beam SDK
3
Authenticate with API token
Configure your API token to connect to Beam
4
Deploy your first app
Run a function locally, then deploy it as a web endpoint with the Beam CLI

Salad Cloud

Get Started

1
Create a SaladCloud account
Sign up at portal.salad.com to reach the dashboard, API keys, and deployment tools.
2
Pick a GPU class and priority tier
Compare published per-GPU-hour rates and live availability on the pricing page, then choose the tier that matches how interruptible the workload is.
3
Deploy a container group
Supply a Docker image, CPU/memory/GPU resources, and a replica count through the portal or the public API; Recipes provide ready-made templates for popular open models.
4
Monitor and scale
Track replicas in the portal and adjust GPU class, priority, or replica count; the container engine reallocates work as nodes join and leave the network.
5
Talk to sales for reserved or volume capacity
Large deployments, committed spend, and Salad Dedicated allocations are quoted directly rather than bought self-service.

Support & Global Availability

Beam

Global Regions

30+ regions spanning the US, EU, Asia-Pacific, and Canada, with workloads routed across clouds and regions in real time

Support

Documentation, public Slack community, and a status page; live chat support on paid plans and a private Slack channel on the top tier

Salad Cloud

Global Regions

Nodes in 190+ countries across the distributed network; capacity is chosen by GPU class and priority tier rather than by selectable region, and availability varies by class.

Support

Documentation at docs.salad.com, a developer hub and Recipes library, status page at cloud-status.salad.com, Trust Center, Discord and GitHub communities, and direct engineering and sales contact for volume and enterprise deployments.