FluidStack vs PowerGPU at a glance
FluidStack
Neocloud turned AI-factory builder: dedicated, multi-year contracts for a handful of large labs
PowerGPU
Fixed prices at market median × 0.70, crypto only, verified datacenters
| FluidStack | PowerGPU | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Not published — no live self-serve rate card as of the date checked | Per second, no minimum, price locked at deploy |
| Payment | Not published for self-serve; large deals are contracted and invoiced | Crypto only — USDT (TRC-20/ERC-20), BTC, XMR, LTC, ETH, TRX, SOL |
| Identity | Enterprise sales process for capacity deals; no public self-serve sign-up found | Email + password. No KYC, no card, no stored IP addresses |
| Free credit | None published | None — every hour is ≥30% under the market median instead |
| Cheaper tier | Not applicable — there is no published on-demand tier to discount | Interruptible flat −50% (no auction) · reserved −35% (3+ months) |
| Regions | Sites reported in the UK, France, Iceland, Norway, Argentina and the US, built for named-customer contracts rather than self-serve zones | 32 regions on 5 continents, verified datacenters only |
| Minimums | Multi-year dedicated-cluster contracts, by the company's own public description of its business | None — 1× to 8× GPUs at the same per-GPU price |
| Storage | Not published | $0.08/GB/month NVMe, volumes survive instances |
| Egress | Not published | $0.01/GB in and out, every region |
| Access | Sales-led onboarding; no public self-serve console or API documentation found at the date checked | Containers or full KVM VMs, SSH, Jupyter, REST API, CLI, Python SDK |
FluidStack column: as published on fluidstack.io on 2026-09-04. Details change — verify before you decide.
FluidStack vs PowerGPU prices, GPU by GPU
Public on-demand list prices per GPU-hour on FluidStack'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 | FluidStack list | PowerGPU on-demand | PowerGPU interruptible | Difference |
|---|
Configurations differ (node sizes, tiers, regions); the note beside each card says which FluidStack price is quoted. Negative differences mean FluidStack is cheaper on that card.
When to stay with FluidStack
- You are, or are becoming, one of the small number of named customers FluidStack builds gigawatt-scale dedicated capacity for — that relationship is not something a per-GPU-hour public cloud replaces.
- An invoiced, multi-year, capex-style infrastructure contract is what your finance and procurement teams actually want.
Why teams switch to PowerGPU
- You need a GPU today, not a sales process: PowerGPU is a self-serve console with instances live in about 30 seconds, no contract and no minimum term.
- A published rate card anyone can read before signing up, fixed at the public market median × 0.70, instead of no public pricing at all.
- 32 self-serve regions on five continents versus a handful of dedicated sites built for named contracts.
- Crypto payment with no KYC and no procurement cycle — the price sheet is the quote.
Switching from FluidStack: what maps to what
| On FluidStack | On PowerGPU |
|---|---|
| Private Cloud / dedicated cluster contract (sales-led) | Reserved instance, flat −35% from 3 months, or a multi-node InfiniBand cluster quoted from the public sheet — no sales call for a handful of GPUs |
| (no published self-serve tier) | On-demand instance, per second, fixed at market median × 0.70, live in about 30 seconds |
| Enterprise / KYB onboarding | Email sign-up, crypto top-up, deploy |
pip install powergpu
export POWERGPU_API_KEY=pg_live_… # console → API keys
powergpu launch --gpu h100-sxm --template pytorch --disk 100 --volume data:/data
# ✓ instance i-52ab77c1 running (24.1s) · $1.428/hr · per second
powergpu stop i-52ab77c1 # billing ends this secondData moves the boring way: rsync or rclone from your FluidStack machine to a PowerGPU volume, which then mounts on every future instance in seconds. Templates for PyTorch, vLLM, ComfyUI and Ollama are official images; anything else runs from its OCI reference.
A real month, costed
FluidStack alternative: FAQ
Is PowerGPU cheaper than FluidStack?
There is nothing public to compare against: fluidstack.io's pricing page returned HTTP 404 and its homepage carried no rate card when checked 2026-09-04 — the company has pivoted to invoiced, multi-year Private Cloud contracts, reported at about 62% of revenue by the end of 2024 versus 38% for the original on-demand marketplace. PowerGPU publishes on-demand prices fixed at the public market median × 0.70 before you sign up for anything.
Can I still rent a single FluidStack GPU by the hour?
No self-serve page, console, sign-up flow or API documentation was reachable from fluidstack.io as of 2026-09-04. Treat any hourly figure quoted for FluidStack elsewhere as unconfirmed against the company's current site.
What does FluidStack sell now?
Dedicated, contracted AI-factory capacity for a small number of large customers, most visibly reported alongside Anthropic's compute build-out, across sites in the US, UK, France, Iceland, Norway and Argentina, funded by a $1.5B round that valued the company at about $18B (2026).
Try the switch for the price of a coffee
Top up $40 in USDT or Monero, deploy the same image you run on FluidStack, and benchmark it. No card, no KYC, per-second billing — stop it the minute you are done.
FluidStack and its logo are trademarks of their owner, used here only to identify the compared service; PowerGPU is not affiliated with FluidStack. NVIDIA GPU names are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
