RunPod L40S Pricing Options
All available L40S instance types on RunPod, sorted by lowest hourly rate.
| Region | Instance | Type | Price/hr | GPUs | vCPUs | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 | NVIDIA L40 | On-Demand | $0.6900/hr Cheapest | 1× GPU | — | — |
| us-east-1 | NVIDIA L40S | On-Demand | $0.7900/hr | 1× GPU | — | — |
| community | NVIDIA L40S-spot | Spot | $0.7900/hr | 1× GPU | — | — |
| US/EU | L40S 48GB | On-Demand | $1.3900/hr | 1× GPU | 16 vCPU | 125 GB |
About RunPod L40S Cloud Pricing
RunPod operates a GPU cloud marketplace that aggregates capacity from multiple data centers, offering both community cloud (lower-cost shared infrastructure) and secure cloud (dedicated servers) tiers.
Why Choose RunPod for L40S
- Among the lowest on-demand GPU prices in the market
- Serverless GPU endpoints for inference workloads
- Wide GPU model selection from consumer (RTX 3090) to enterprise (H100)
- Template marketplace for one-click ML environment deployment
Best suited for: Individual developers, hobbyists, and cost-sensitive teams who prioritize price over enterprise features. RunPod's community cloud tier is often the cheapest option for experimentation.
L40S Technical Overview
RunPod offers H100 in both their Secure Cloud (dedicated bare-metal) and Community Cloud (shared) tiers -- the only provider in the top 5 with genuine spot-style H100 pricing via their interruptible Secure Cloud option. H100 availability fluctuates based on demand and data center capacity, which RunPod's API exposes in real-time (check /v2/instances/available). For inference at scale, RunPod's Serverless GPU Endpoints allow pay-per-token serving without pre-provisioned GPU capacity, a model unique among top-5 H100 providers. RunPod's H100 Secure Cloud pricing often undercuts Lambda by 15-25% for comparable configurations, but availability windows are shorter and provisioning can take 5-30 minutes during peak demand.
Pricing Analysis
RunPod's cheapest L40S option starts at $0.6900/hr, which is 65% below the market average of $1.9796/hr. RunPod offers both on-demand and spot pricing for L40S. Spot instances can save 50–70% for interruptible workloads like batch processing and hyperparameter sweeps.
Note: RunPod's community cloud offers the lowest prices but with shared infrastructure — the secure cloud tier provides dedicated resources at moderately higher rates.
Market context: L40S pricing is typically 40–60% below H100, making it an excellent choice for inference-heavy deployments where training performance is not the primary requirement.
Top Alternatives to RunPod for L40S
Side-by-side cost comparison vs the cheapest RunPod L40S rate ($0.6900/hr).
| Provider | Price/hr | Type | vs RunPod |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vast.ai | $0.4037/hr | Spot | -41% cheaper vs RunPod |
| TensorDock | $0.5900/hr | On-Demand | -14% cheaper vs RunPod |
| Lightning AI | $0.6500/hr | On-Demand | -6% cheaper vs RunPod |
| Nebius | $0.8700/hr | On-Demand | +26% more vs RunPod |
| Crusoe Cloud | $0.9900/hr | On-Demand | +43% more vs RunPod |
Calculate Your Exact L40S Cost
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Frequently Asked Questions
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