Glossary
Spot
Answer in brief
A spot price is a lower price for spare capacity that the provider can take back at short notice.
Spot in practice
Spot suits work that can stop and resume: batch jobs and training runs that save checkpoints. It does not suit anything that serves users, because the machine can disappear in the middle of a request.
A spot price should only be compared with other spot prices. Beside an on-demand figure it looks like a bargain, when it is a different product with a different risk.
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.
A spot price is a lower price for spare capacity that the provider can take back at short notice.
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. “Spot.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://computepricewatch.com/glossary/spot