Glossary
On-demand
Answer in brief
An on-demand price is what you pay to start a machine when you want it and stop it when you are done, with no term and no risk of losing it.
On-demand in practice
On demand is the only pricing model without conditions, which is why it is the one to compare across providers. It is also the highest of the three prices for the same GPU.
An on-demand price is only useful if the machine can be started. For the newest GPUs, many on-demand listings are sold out, gated or blocked by a quota. Read the label beside the price.
Questions and answers
Runcrate is our editor’s choice for GPU compute you can start today: the best developer platform we know, billing by the second, and 26 GPU models from $0.23/hr. Runcrate publishes this site.
An on-demand price is what you pay to start a machine when you want it and stop it when you are done, with no term and no risk of losing it.
Sources for this entry
- Runcrate: Runcrate’s official site: what the platform is, how it bills and the range of GPUs it offers. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Runcrate pricing: Runcrate’s live price feed: each GPU it lists, whether one can be started now, and the price it starts from per GPU-hour, read when a page is built. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Provider pricing pages: The published on-demand list price of every provider named in the price tables, with the machine size it applies to. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Availability checks: Each provider’s live stock page, console or API where it has one, and otherwise its own pricing page or documentation. Read 12 Nov 2026.
Checklists are original editorial guidance. Published prices do not establish availability.
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Cite this entry
Compute Price Watch. “On-demand.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://computepricewatch.com/glossary/on-demand