The competition.
Every player in the GPU-rental picture and where we sit among them, written plainly: the marketplaces we read, the brokers we compete with, the comparison sheets we out-live, and the giants that set the ceiling. Strengths and weaknesses ours included — a map drawn honestly is the only kind worth navigating by.
compiled 2026-08-24 from public sources · …
The matrix.
Capability by player class — the landscape below names every player. An honest tick for a rival is worth more than a flattering blank.
| Capability | us | Shadeform | Prime Intellect | SkyPilot | GPUsMarket | Sheets | Source markets | Hyperscalers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live cross-provider book, normalized $/GPU/hr | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | ~ | — | — |
| Price history you can query | ✓ | — | — | ✓ | — | — | — | ~ |
| Price alerts, no account | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Standing limit orders (trigger → signed fill ticket → execution) | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Workload-aware pricing (training / inference lenses) | ✓ | — | — | — | — | ~ | — | — |
| MCP / agent-native | ✓ | — | — | ~ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Rents machines through it | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Zero platform fee, stated in the API | ✓ | — | — | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Keys/custody never leave you | ✓ | — | — | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| One invoice across providers | — | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — |
| Hyperscaler prices in the book | — | ~ | — | ✓ | — | ✓ | — | n/a |
| Owns hardware / gives SLAs | — | — | — | — | — | — | ~ | ✓ |
✓ has it · ~ partly · — doesn't · hover a cell for the caveat
The landscape.
Four kinds of player. A supplier can also be a rival; every feed we aggregate would rather you came to them directly.
| Player | What it is | Relationship |
|---|---|---|
| Feeds we aggregate today — 10 | ||
| Vast.aithe deep book | Peer GPU marketplace; auction-priced, the cheapest interruptible capacity anywhere and the widest consumer-card variety. ~70% of our book. | source |
| RunPod | GPU cloud with community and secure tiers; serverless endpoints. Both our rental rails run here and on Vast. | source |
| DataCrunch | EU dedicated GPU cloud (Finland, green energy); clean per-model catalog. | source |
| Akash | Decentralized compute marketplace, crypto-settled; we read the network's minimum ask per model. | source |
| Cudo Compute | GPU cloud; closed to new customers since March 2026 — availability now "by request", which caps how useful its quotes are. | source |
| io.net | Decentralized GPU network (Solana); undocumented explorer market feed, read per-product. | source |
| Hyperstack | NexGen Cloud's GPU platform; flavors × pricebook × live stocks behind a free key. Live in the book since 2026-08-24. | source |
| Novita | GPU cloud with a products catalog and per-region offers; keyed. Live in the book since 2026-08-24. | source |
| Prime Intellectalso a rival | Aggregator we also read — its feed carries Lambda's book among others. Full row under direct competitors. | source competes |
| Shadeformalso a rival | Aggregator we also read (19 clouds via its feed). Full row under direct competitors. | source competes |
| Supply we can add, key-gated — 3 | ||
| TensorDock | GPU marketplace; inventory API answers only for funded accounts ($5 minimum). Adapter written, waiting on the deposit. | pending |
| Lambda | AI cloud with on-demand instances and clusters; free API key exposes prices + live regional capacity. | pending |
| Salad | Distributed consumer-GPU network; customer prices need a key — its public feed is supplier earnings, the wrong side of the market to quote. | pending |
| Direct competitors — aggregation & brokerage | ||
| Shadeformthe funded analog | YC-backed GPU marketplace ($20M raised): one API and console over 30+ clouds, unified billing, routes to the cheapest instance. A reseller — you buy through them. Since 2026-08-24 also a feed in our book. | competes source |
| Prime Intellect | "Compute exchange" aggregating ~a dozen clouds, paired with decentralized training; rentals go through their platform. Since 2026-08-24 also a feed in our book. | competes source |
| SkyPilotGPU Compass | Open-source multi-cloud launcher; its GPU Compass dashboard compares 20+ clouds and keeps spot-price history. You bring your own cloud accounts — the closest thing to our BYO-key stance. | competes |
| GPUsMarket | Agent-first GPU rental with a CLI + MCP server — proof we are not the only ones who noticed agents buy compute; sells its own market rather than aggregating. | competes |
| Compute Exchange | Compute auction/brokerage platform positioning around the 2026 capacity crunch. | competes |
| Comparison sheets | ||
| GetDeploying · ComputePrices · cloud-gpus.com · GPU Finder… | Static or periodically-refreshed price tables. Useful bookmarks; no live book, no history you can query, no alerts, no execution. This is the graveyard tier — and what we would be if we stopped at a table. | competes |
| The backdrop | ||
| AWS · GCP · Azure · OCI | The price ceiling and the quota wall. H100s at multiples of marketplace rates; enterprises pay it for the SLA. We don't quote them (yet) — deliberate, our buyer is price-driven. | context |
| CoreWeave · Nebius · Crusoe… | Neoclouds that own the metal. They are who the brokers resell; several are also feeds inside Shadeform and Compass. | context |
Where that leaves us.
Strengths
- Agents are the first customer, not a feature. Native MCP over the same core as the UI, listed in the official registry. Only GPUsMarket shares the thesis, and they sell one market — we aggregate.
- Zero fee we can actually afford. One process on commodity hosting; fee_bps: 0 published in every response. A $20M burn rate cannot copy this price.
- BYO-key brokering. We place rentals with your provider key and never store it. Every funded competitor wants to be your wallet instead.
- The tape. Price history per model and class recorded every half hour since first boot — a past no late entrant can backfill. Only SkyPilot keeps anything comparable.
- The tripwire → limit orders. Under-the-market alerts with no account — and since 2026-08-24 they execute: standing limit orders via signed fill tickets and the open-source keyholder sidecar, custody-free. Nobody else has either half, let alone the pipe.
- Idle capacity as the editorial spine — interruptible-first ranking, the idle index, the discount instrument. The cheap half of the market is our home turf, not an afterthought.
Weaknesses
- Ten feeds vs Shadeform's thirty. Coverage is our thinnest wall; it grows a signup at a time.
- The tape is young. Days of history where Compass shows quarters. Time fixes this and only time.
- No unified billing. A team that wants one invoice across clouds goes to Shadeform or Prime Intellect today. That is Stage 3, unbuilt.
- No hardware, no SLA, no enterprise story. We are an instrument over other people's machines and say so.
- No brand, no track record. Unnamed product, zero testimonials, a book that has never had a paying renter through it.
- No hyperscaler quotes — deliberate, but it means the enterprise comparison shopper bounces.
Points of difference
- Instrument, not reseller. Everyone funded wants to sit between you and the provider and clip the flow. We read the market, point, and step aside — the renter pays the provider's own price.
- Machine-first distribution. Registry listing, llms.txt, keyless REST — discovered by agents, not ad spend.
- Honesty as interface. Stale flags shown, unrated models named, "not a forecast" printed on the timing instrument, fee stated in-band. In a market full of "from $0.99*" tables this reads different because it is.
- A product with a world. The pond, the frog, the field-journal voice — nobody mistakes this for another dashboard template, and nobody forgets it either.
- The five-minute money book. The feeds people actually rent from refresh every five minutes; the sleepy catalogs every thirty — and we print which is which. Sheets refresh weekly and hide it.
- Every price carries its own tape. Each row in the market table draws that model's last 24 hours inline, off history we recorded ourselves. A table a competitor can copy in a day; the tape behind it they cannot.
- Accountless to the bone. The book, the API, the MCP endpoint and the price alerts all work with no signup, no email, no cookie wall. Metering is an optional bearer token. Everyone else gates at the inbox.
- The workload lens. The price column itself answers "for MY work": flip the market table to training and it re-prices every card in FP16 TFLOPS-hours per dollar; flip it to inference and it prices the VRAM that actually gates serving; flip it to bandwidth and it prices the ceiling for memory-bound work. Spec-sheet ceilings, never benchmarks, unrated cards named and sunk — the honesty is what makes the comparison usable, and nobody else re-prices a live book this way.
- Safety rails built for unattended buyers. Rentals dry-run by default, price caps absolute, an optional budget guard that destroys the rental at the cap — its own failure mode disclosed in the receipt — and idempotent fills that cannot double-rent on a retry. Exchange-grade paranoia, documented.