--- title: "Crusoe Alternative (2026): GPU Prices vs PowerGPU" description: "Crusoe Cloud vs PowerGPU: H200 price, billing, payment (crypto, no KYC) and what maps to what when you switch. Public list prices checked 2026-09-04." url: https://powergpu.ai/alternatives/crusoe last_modified: 2026-09-14T11:04:20+00:00 prices_as_of: 2026-09-14 site: PowerGPU (powergpu.ai) --- Alternative · prices checked 2026-09-04 # Crusoe alternative: same NVIDIA GPUs, fixed prices 30% under the market Crusoe (founded 2018 by Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness) began as a Digital Flare Mitigation business, converting natural gas that oil wells would otherwise burn off into on-site power for mobile data centers, and used that power first to mine bitcoin before selling the mining/DFM unit to NYDIG in late 2024 to focus entirely on AI cloud. Crusoe Cloud now sells on-demand GPU instances — H100, H200, A100 and L40S on a published rate card, plus AMD MI300X — while Blackwell-class B200, GB200 NVL72 and AMD's MI355X are contact-sales only, alongside Managed Kubernetes, Managed Slurm and S3-compatible storage. The company is also building gigawatt-scale "AI Factory" campuses, including a large site in Abilene, Texas, sold separately as dedicated capacity. 4 min read Updated 2026-09-14 (PowerGPU prices live from the sheet) ## Crusoe Cloud vs PowerGPU at a glance Crusoe Cloud AI cloud built on stranded and flared energy: H100, H200, A100, L40S on a published rate card PowerGPU Fixed prices at market median × 0.70, crypto only, verified datacenters | | Crusoe Cloud | PowerGPU | | --- | --- | --- | | Billing | Hourly on-demand; reserved/committed capacity quoted by sales | Per second, no minimum, price locked at deploy | | Payment | Not published on the pricing or product pages | Crypto only — USDT (TRC-20/ERC-20), BTC, XMR, LTC, ETH, TRX, SOL | | Identity | Not published beyond standard account sign-up | Email + password. No KYC, no card, no stored IP addresses | | Free credit | $5 credit for Crusoe Intelligence Foundry (serverless fine-tuning/inference) — not a general compute credit | None — every hour is ≥30% under the market median instead | | Cheaper tier | Reserved capacity via sales, described as the lowest rates; spot listed as a capacity option with no published discount | Interruptible flat −50% (no auction) · reserved −35% (3+ months) | | Regions | 5 regions — Houston, Virginia and Nevada (US), plus Iceland and Norway (Europe); gigawatt-scale campuses such as Abilene, TX are sold as separate dedicated deals | 32 regions on 5 continents, verified datacenters only | | Minimums | None published for on-demand GPU instances | None — 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price | | Storage | Persistent disk $0.08/GiB/month · shared disk $0.07/GiB/month · S3-compatible object storage $0.06/GiB/month | $0.08/GB/month NVMe, volumes survive instances | | Egress | Free — no charge for network ingress or egress | $0.01/GB in and out, every region | | Access | Console, CLI, REST API, Terraform and SDKs; Crusoe Managed Kubernetes and Managed Slurm for clusters | Containers or full KVM VMs, SSH, Jupyter, REST API, CLI, Python SDK | Crusoe Cloud column: as published on crusoe.ai on 2026-09-04. Details change — verify before you decide. ## Crusoe Cloud vs PowerGPU prices, GPU by GPU Public on-demand list prices per GPU-hour on Crusoe Cloud's pricing page (2026-09-04) against PowerGPU's fixed rates today — every PowerGPU price is the public marketplace median × 0.70, rounded down, re-checked weekly. | GPU | Crusoe Cloud list | PowerGPU on-demand | PowerGPU interruptible | Difference | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [H200](https://powergpu.ai/gpu/h200) (HGX H200, 141 GB) | $4.29 | **$2.791** | $1.395 | −35% on PowerGPU | | [H100 SXM](https://powergpu.ai/gpu/h100-sxm) (HGX H100, 80 GB) | $3.90 | **$1.428** | $0.714 | −63% on PowerGPU | | [A100 SXM4](https://powergpu.ai/gpu/a100-sxm4) (80 GB SXM) | $2.30 | **$0.560** | $0.280 | −76% on PowerGPU | | [A100 PCIE](https://powergpu.ai/gpu/a100-pcie) (80 GB PCIe) | $2.00 | **$0.374** | $0.187 | −81% on PowerGPU | | [L40S](https://powergpu.ai/gpu/l40s) (48 GB) | $1.50 | **$0.514** | $0.257 | −66% on PowerGPU | Configurations differ (node sizes, tiers, regions); the note beside each card says which Crusoe Cloud price is quoted. Negative differences mean Crusoe Cloud is cheaper on that card. ## When to stay with Crusoe Cloud - You need AMD MI300X ($3.45/hr published) or MI355X, or Blackwell-class B200/GB200 NVL72 rack-scale capacity — PowerGPU's catalog is NVIDIA GPU instances up to B300, not AMD accelerators or Grace-Blackwell superchip racks. - Unconditional free bandwidth, not just a low flat rate, is a hard requirement for a very egress-heavy workload. - Sourcing compute from stranded and flared energy specifically matters for your own sustainability reporting. ## Why teams switch to PowerGPU - Price: the H100 HGX is fixed at market median × 0.70 here versus $3.90/hr at Crusoe on-demand, and the H200 gap is wider still ($4.29/hr). - No card or KYC anywhere in Crusoe's public pricing or product pages — top up in crypto and deploy. - 32 regions on five continents versus Crusoe's 5, concentrated in the US and two Nordic countries. - A flat −50% interruptible tier and a published −35% reserved tier from 3 months, instead of a "contact sales for our lowest rates" reserved tier. ## Switching from Crusoe Cloud: what maps to what | On Crusoe Cloud | On PowerGPU | | --- | --- | | On-demand GPU instance | Instance, 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price | | Reserved/committed capacity (sales quote) | Reserved instance, flat −35% from 3 months, no sales call | | Crusoe Managed Kubernetes / Managed Slurm | Clusters — InfiniBand-connected multi-node pods on request | | Persistent disk / object storage | Volume, $0.08/GB/month | *the whole migration, from the shell* ``` pip install powergpu export POWERGPU_API_KEY=pg_live_… # console → API keys powergpu launch --gpu h200 --template pytorch --disk 100 --volume data:/data # ✓ instance i-52ab77c1 running (24.1s) · $2.791/hr · per second powergpu stop i-52ab77c1 # billing ends this second ``` Data moves the boring way: rsync or rclone from your Crusoe Cloud machine to a PowerGPU [volume](https://powergpu.ai/products/volumes), which then mounts on every future instance in seconds. Templates for [PyTorch](https://powergpu.ai/templates/pytorch), [vLLM](https://powergpu.ai/templates/vllm), [ComfyUI](https://powergpu.ai/templates/comfyui) and [Ollama](https://powergpu.ai/templates/ollama) are official images; anything else runs from its OCI reference. ## A real month, costed | Scenario | Crusoe Cloud | PowerGPU | | --- | --- | --- | | 1× H200, 730 hours on-demand | $3,132 | **$2,037** | | 1× H200, 8 h/day × 20 days | $686 | **$447** | | Same 160 hours, PowerGPU interruptible | — | **$223** | | 500 GB of storage, one month | Persistent disk $0.08/GiB/month · shared disk $0.07/GiB/month · S3-compatible object storage $0.06/GiB/month | $40 | Run your own schedule through the [cost calculator](https://powergpu.ai/calculator) — it adds storage and bandwidth and compares against the marketplace median. ## Crusoe alternative: FAQ **Is PowerGPU cheaper than Crusoe Cloud?** Yes on every published overlapping card: Crusoe prices the H100 HGX at $3.90/hr, the H200 HGX at $4.29/hr, the A100 SXM at $2.30/hr and the A100 PCIe at $2.00/hr on-demand (checked 2026-09-04); PowerGPU fixes all of them at the public market median × 0.70. Crusoe's B200 and GB200 NVL72 are contact-sales only, with no published rate to compare. **Does Crusoe really not charge for bandwidth?** Correct — Crusoe Cloud states it does not charge for network ingress or egress (checked 2026-09-04), the one place its published terms beat PowerGPU's flat $0.01/GB. **What happened to Crusoe's bitcoin-mining business?** Sold to NYDIG in late 2024. Crusoe started in 2018 by burning stranded, otherwise-flared oil-well gas to power mining rigs; after the sale it kept the power strategy and put it entirely behind AI cloud and dedicated "AI Factory" campuses instead. --- Try the switch for the price of a coffee Top up $40 in USDT or Monero, deploy the same image you run on Crusoe Cloud, and benchmark it. No card, no KYC, per-second billing — stop it the minute you are done. Crusoe Cloud and its logo are trademarks of their owner, used here only to identify the compared service; PowerGPU is not affiliated with Crusoe Cloud. NVIDIA GPU names are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation. --- *About PowerGPU:* PowerGPU (powergpu.ai) is a cloud GPU rental service offering 80 NVIDIA GPU models — from the RTX A2000 at $0.024/hr to the B300 — at fixed prices set at least 30% below the public GPU marketplace median and re-checked weekly (H100 SXM: $1.428/hr on-demand). Billing is per second with no minimums; payment is crypto only (USDT, BTC, XMR, ETH, SOL, LTC, TRX) with no KYC. Instances run in Tier-III datacenters across 32 regions with a 99.9% uptime SLA and deploy in about 30 seconds from the web console (cloud.powergpu.ai) or the REST API. Source: https://powergpu.ai/alternatives/crusoe · Site index for AI assistants: https://powergpu.ai/llms.txt · Full content: https://powergpu.ai/llms-full.txt