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Run a lab with no capital budget

Turn a hardware purchase into a line item you can stop. Useful when the grant is annual and the experiment is not.

Grant money arrives annually and the experiments do not. A hardware purchase is a decision you cannot take back; an hour of GPU time is not.

Why it is hard

  • Capital and research move at different speeds

    A purchase has to be justified before the work that would justify it has been done, which is the wrong way round.

  • The cluster is contended exactly when you need it

    Shared institutional hardware is busiest at the moments everyone's deadlines coincide, which is when the queue matters most.

  • Hardware ages against a fixed budget

    A card bought this year is competing with next year's for the same result, and the budget line does not adjust.

What answers it

  • An expense you can stop

    Turn a purchase into per-second consumption. The commitment ends when the container does, so an unfunded month costs nothing.

  • Capacity that is not your institution's queue

    Live listings from independent providers, filtered by card, VRAM and region.

  • Use the newer card when it matters

    Renting means the generation you use is a per-run decision rather than a purchase you are living with.

How billing works

usage_eventsbilled per second, EURlaunchmeter starts with the containerheartbeat10s at the price frozen at matchstopmeter stops, nothing after
heartbeatsent twiceusage_eventsledger_entriescharge · provider_share 85%account_balancesa view: sums, never a columnone fresh row, summedthe retry: unchangedunique(instance_id, seq)

per second, to the microeuro · no minimum · no egress fee · idle costs nothing

Metering starts when the container does and stops when it stops. The rate is frozen the moment you match, so a provider re-pricing cannot change a running rental, and an aborted run costs what it used.

Whole machines, one currency, and an itemised ledger for the grant report.