Buy the GPU,
or rent it?
Put the purchase price, your electricity rate and the hourly cloud price side by side, and see which one actually costs less for the hours you use.
Pick a card
NVIDIA only, on purpose: almost nobody rents Radeon by the hour, so there is no honest hourly rate to set against one. On another card, type your own price and rate into the fields below.
The three numbers that decide it
Prices and hourly rates are starting points, last checked 2026-09. Every one of them is editable — use what you can actually buy and rent for.
Hours of use per month
How long you will keep it
Resale value at the end
What you expect to get back selling it when you are done. It is the part of the price you never really spend.
Owning a GPU means powering a whole machine around it; renting one does not. Leave this out and owning looks about a third cheaper than it is.
Your electricity rate
The answer
Rent it
You would not use it enough to justify the purchase. Hours in someone else’s data centre cost less than the card losing value in yours.
Owning
$1,440
$60/mo · $0.75/h
Renting
$1,325
$55/mo · $0.69/h
Break-even usage
88 h/mo
Use it more than this each month and buying wins; less, and renting does.
Pays for itself in
27 mo
How long renting takes to add up to what the card costs you.
Where the owning figure comes from
Renting is simply the hourly rate times the hours — no hardware losing value, and no power bill of your own.
Where to rent it by the hour
Providers that rent this class of GPU. Check their current rate before you commit — the hourly price above is an estimate, theirs is the real one.
What this does not count
Storage, bandwidth and the time spent moving data in and out, on the rental side. Noise, heat, the rest of the build and the fact that an owned card is also a gaming PC, on the other. Both matter; neither is a number this page can guess for you.
Frequently asked questions
addIs it cheaper to rent a GPU or to buy one?
It depends almost entirely on hours. A card used a few hours a week is dead money; the same card running most of the day pays for itself quickly. Put your real hours into the calculator above — the break-even figure it gives is the only version of this answer that applies to you.
addHow many hours a month does a GPU need to be used before buying is worth it?
For a desktop card at typical prices, somewhere between roughly 100 and 300 hours a month is where owning usually overtakes renting. It moves with the purchase price, your electricity rate and what you expect to sell the card for afterwards, which is why all three are editable here.
addWhy is renting a data-centre GPU such better value than buying one?
Because the purchase price is enormous relative to the hourly rate. An H100 costs tens of thousands of dollars and rents for a couple of dollars an hour, so it takes years of near-continuous use before owning makes sense. Consumer cards are the opposite: cheap to buy, and priced by the hour at a level that adds up fast.
addDoes electricity really change the answer?
Enough to matter. A 575 W card plus the machine around it, running eight hours a day, uses roughly 170 kWh a month — about twenty dollars in the United States and considerably more across much of Europe. In an expensive market the electricity alone approaches the rental rate.
addWhat about resale value?
It is the biggest lever on the owning side and the one most often forgotten. A card you sell for 40% of what you paid only ever cost you the other 60%. Renting returns nothing at the end, which is exactly why it loses over long horizons and wins over short ones.
Keep going
Other tools and reference pages that pick up where this one leaves off.