SMB - Last verified June 2026

GPU cloud for SMB AI teams (under 100 employees)

For SMB teams, the right shape is per-second serverless or marketplace capacity for inference, plus an on-demand H100 / A100 for fine-tuning sprints. Reservations and SuperPODs are the wrong tool at this scale. Typical monthly GPU spend at this size lands between $500 and $5,000.

Vendors that fit

RunPod - per-second Pod and Serverless. Community Cloud H100 PCIe at $1.99 per GPU-hour.
Vast.ai - marketplace floor. Interruptible H100 from $1.49 per GPU-hour.
Modal - Python-native serverless. T4 from $0.59 hourly equivalent.
Replicate - Cog-format inference of open-source models with zero infrastructure.
Lambda Labs - on-demand H100 for fine-tuning sprints.

Worked example

Acme Audio Co. (illustrative example, not a real company) is a 12-person SMB serving an audio-transcription product on a single A10G GPU running 18 hours per day. On RunPod Serverless at $1.10 per GPU-hour-equivalent the run-rate is roughly $590 per month. Adding a 1 GPU-day per week of A100 fine-tuning on Lambda on-demand ($1.79 per GPU-hour) adds another $185, putting steady state under $800 per month before storage and egress.

Anti-patterns to avoid

Buying a 12-month reservation for a workload that has not yet found product-market fit.
Defaulting to the hyperscalers because the rest of the company is on AWS or Azure. List rates are 2 to 4x what RunPod or Vast.ai will charge for the same H100-hour.
Treating serverless GPU as free below your traffic floor; cold-start and warm-pool time both bill.

Last verified June 2026.