GPU Rental vs PAYG AI

Renting a GPU you don't fully use is the most expensive AI mistake.

GPU rentals make sense if you're running 24/7 at >70% utilization. Below that, pay-per-token AI is dramatically cheaper. Here's the math.

Idle time = your loss

An A100 on RunPod costs $1.20–$2.00 / hour. If your traffic is 100 requests/day, you're paying for ~23 hours of zero work — every day.

Lexora bills tokens, not hours

Zero traffic = zero bill. 1,000 requests = ~$0.10 for an 8B model. The price tracks usage perfectly.

Distributed network, no provisioning

No instance to start, no cold-start to wait through. Inference routes to a warm node on Lexora's distributed network in milliseconds.

RAG included

Renting a GPU also means building your RAG stack — vector DB, embeddings, retrieval, citations. Lexora bundles all of that, free.

Lexora vs RunPod / Modal / vast.ai

Side-by-side breakdown of what matters.

Feature
Lexora
RunPod / Modal / vast.ai
Pricing model
$0.10 / 1M tokens
$1.20+ / GPU-hour
Idle cost
$0
Full rate while up
Cold start
Sub-second routing
30s – 2 min cold start
RAG / KB
Included
Build it yourself
Best for
<70% utilization workloads
24/7 high-volume workloads
API surface
OpenAI-compatible
Custom per provider

Stop paying for idle GPUs.

If your AI workload doesn't run flat-out 24/7, you're overspending on GPU rentals. Move to pay-per-token and see the difference on your next bill.

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