Runpod — AI for Software Development

Runpod is infrastructure rather than an AI app: you rent GPUs to train, fine-tune or serve models. The homepage describes three products on one account. Pods are on-demand GPU instances across 31 regions, with over 30 GPU types from RTX 4090 up to B200. Serverless runs API-based inference where workers scale from zero, and the page says an idle endpoint costs nothing and cold starts are under 200 ms with FlashBoot. Clusters launch multi-node GPU clusters up to 64 GPUs. The pricing page lists Pod prices per hour, for example RTX A5000 at $0.27 per hour, RTX 4090 at $0.89, H100 SXM at $4.39 and B200 at $7.99. Serverless is priced per worker hour by GPU class. Storage starts at $0.05 per GB per month, and the homepage mentions no egress fees on network storage. Public Endpoints offer pre-deployed models by API with per-unit pricing. Reserved clusters need a call with sales. The site states it is certified. The trade-off is that you manage containers, templates and storage yourself, and there is no free plan on the pricing page, so costs start the moment a Pod runs. If you need cheaper GPUs than the large clouds and are comfortable with Docker, it fits. If you want a hosted chatbot, it does not.