Rent vs Buy

Should you buy a GPU or rent the cloud?

There's no flat answer — it's a break-even. Enter how many hours a day you'd actually use it. The calculator counts all four buckets (purchase price, electricity, depreciation, cloud hourly rate) and gives you a utilization threshold, not a thumb on the scale. Prices are dated and sourced below.

Chat, coding, a document pipeline you lean on. Bursty ≈ 1; daily driver ≈ 4–8.
Observed 580–780 on eBay. Change it for a different card.
Observed 0.19–0.35/hr, community-cited.
Advanced (electricity, amortization)

Inspectable decision record

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Prices as of August 1, 2026 · community-cited, not independently verified by LocalRig. How we source numbers.

If buying wins → Browse used RTX 3090 24GB on eBay If renting wins → Compare RunPod vs Vast.ai pricing

How this is calculated

Break-even hours = purchase price ÷ (cloud $/hr − your local $/hr), where local $/hr is active draw × electricity rate. Below the threshold, renting is cheaper; above it, owning is. The full worked model — including why depreciation is conservatively treated as sunk cost — is in the rent-vs-buy break-even guide. We also track this break-even every month in the Rent-vs-Buy Index.

  • RTX 3090 used price: eBay used RTX 3090 24GB sold listings, observed (2026-08-01)
  • RTX 4090 rental: RunPod + Vast.ai pricing pages, observed (2026-08-01)
  • Electricity: U.S. EIA average residential rate, 2025