What is the difference between Crusoe and Salad Cloud?

Crusoe 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: Crusoe 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 Crusoe 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 44 different GPU models across both Crusoe and Salad Cloud, with 0 models available from both providers.

Crusoe vs Salad Cloud

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

Crusoe

Provider 1

GPUs Available

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Salad Cloud

Provider 2

GPUs Available

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Comparison Overview

Total GPU Models

Crusoe GPUs

Salad Cloud GPUs

Direct Comparisons

GPU Pricing Comparison

Total GPUs: 44Both available: 0Crusoe: 7Salad Cloud: 37

Showing 15 of 44 GPUs

Last updated: 10/30/2026, 6:27:28 PM

GPU Model ↑	Crusoe Price	Salad Cloud Price	Price Diff ↕	Sources
A100 PCIe 80GB 80GB VRAM • Crusoe	$2.00/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
A100 PCIe 80GB 80GB VRAM • Crusoe $2.00/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
A100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Crusoe	$2.30/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
A100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Crusoe $2.30/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
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 • Crusoe	$3.90/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
H100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Crusoe $3.90/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
H200 141GB VRAM • Crusoe	$4.29/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
H200 141GB VRAM • Crusoe $4.29/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
HGX B300 288GB VRAM • Crusoe	$8.96/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
HGX B300 288GB VRAM • Crusoe $8.96/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
L40S 48GB VRAM • Crusoe	$1.50/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
L40S 48GB VRAM • Crusoe $1.50/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
MI300X 192GB VRAM • Crusoe	$3.45/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
MI300X 192GB VRAM • Crusoe $3.45/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
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

A100 PCIe 80GB 80GB VRAM • Crusoe	$2.00/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
A100 PCIe 80GB 80GB VRAM • Crusoe $2.00/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
A100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Crusoe	$2.30/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
A100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Crusoe $2.30/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
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 • Crusoe	$3.90/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
H100 SXM 80GB VRAM • Crusoe $3.90/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
H200 141GB VRAM • Crusoe	$4.29/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
H200 141GB VRAM • Crusoe $4.29/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
HGX B300 288GB VRAM • Crusoe	$8.96/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
HGX B300 288GB VRAM • Crusoe $8.96/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
L40S 48GB VRAM • Crusoe	$1.50/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
L40S 48GB VRAM • Crusoe $1.50/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
MI300X 192GB VRAM • Crusoe	$3.45/hr★ Best	Not Available	—	Crusoe
MI300X 192GB VRAM • Crusoe $3.45/hour Updated: 10/30/2026 ★Best Price Not Available Crusoe
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

LLM API Pricing Comparison

Total models: 7Both available: 0Crusoe: 7Salad Cloud: 0

Showing 7 of 7 models

Prices per 1M tokens · Last updated: 10/30/2026, 6:27:28 PM

Model ↑	Crusoe	Salad Cloud	Input Diff ↕
DeepSeek V4 Flash DeepSeek	$0.140 in $0.280 out	Not available	—
DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek	$1.74 in $3.48 out	Not available	—
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash DeepSeek	$0.290 in $1.20 out	Not available	—
GLM-5.3 Z.ai	$1.40 in $4.40 out	Not available	—
GLM-5.3-Flash Z.ai	$0.150 in $0.500 out	Not available	—
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B NVIDIA	$0.050 in $0.200 out	Not available	—
Qwen3.8 27B Alibaba	$0.250 in $2.00 out	Not available	—

Features Comparison

Crusoe

Energy-First Infrastructure
Vertically integrated power sourcing across wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, natural gas, and carbon capture
Fast Spin Up
Machines are deployed quickly when they are launched
Persistent Storage
Persistent and shared disks, object storage, and a container registry for AI datasets
SXM Support
Provides instances with NVIDIA SXM GPU interconnects
SLA Guarantee
99.5% uptime commitment backed by 24/7 enterprise-grade support
Managed Inference
LLM inference with up to 9.9x faster time-to-first-token and 5x higher throughput versus vLLM

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

Crusoe

Advantages

Great GPU availability for on-demand use
Published hourly on-demand rates for most GPU types
Renewable and low-carbon energy sourcing with vertical integration from power to cloud
99.5% uptime commitment with 24/7 enterprise support

Considerations

Contact sales required for newest GPU models (GB200, B200, MI355X)
Spot capacity is quoted by sales rather than published as a self-service rate
Data center footprint concentrated in the United States with limited European capacity

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

Crusoe

GPU Instances

High-performance GPU instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs

CPU Instances

General-purpose and storage-optimized CPU instances for data processing

Managed Inference

Fully managed LLM inference spanning serverless, self-serve dedicated, and tailored deployments

Open models including DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6, Llama 3.3, Gemma 4, Qwen3, GPT-OSS, and Nemotron 3
Serverless Inference billed per million input, output, and cached tokens

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

Crusoe

On-Demand Instances

Pay by the hour for maximum agility and unthrottled compute

Spot Instances

Use spare capacity at significant discounts compared to on-demand pricing

Reserved Instances

Lock in guaranteed resources at lowest rates with custom commitments

Pay-as-you-go Inference

Flexible pricing for LLM inference based on token usage

Provisioned Throughput

Guaranteed inference capacity with AI Model Units, priced lower for longer commitments

Dedicated Inference Deployments

Hourly per-GPU pricing for self-serve dedicated endpoints, with monthly and volume rates via sales

Serverless Fine-Tuning

Per-token pricing tiered by the parameter count of the base model being tuned

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

Crusoe

Get Started

1
Create an account
Sign up for Crusoe Cloud services through their website
2
Select GPU instance
Choose from available GPU types including L40S, A100, H100, H200, B200, GB200, and AMD options
3
Configure storage
Set up persistent storage options for your workloads
4
Launch instance
Deploy via the console, or provision programmatically with the Crusoe CLI or Terraform

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

Crusoe

Global Regions

Data centers sited near low-cost energy in the United States, including a large-scale campus in Abilene, Texas, plus European capacity in Iceland and Norway

Support

Documentation, learning hub, and 24/7 enterprise-grade support with a 99.5% uptime commitment; SOC 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 certifications

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.