Estimate how long it takes for buying a GPU to beat renting an equivalent one in the cloud,
at your electricity price and daily usage. Rough guidance, not financial advice.
1 · Your rig & power
Enter your own price — this tool never fills in a street price for you.
Pick a GPU above to load its rated power.
Default is the US residential average (0.1856 $/kWh) —
EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, March 2026. Edit for your rate.
024
2 · Cloud rental to compare against
Cloud rates are for the listed cloud cards. If your local GPU is a different model,
this is a rough class comparison — pick the closest cloud card.
Pick a GPU and a cloud rate to see the break-even estimate.
Assumptions & caveats
Your inputs
GPU: —
Up-front cost: $0
Board power used: — (not set)
Electricity: $0.1856/kWh
Usage: 8 hours/day
Cloud comparison: —
How it's calculated
Monthly local electricity = watts ÷ 1000 × hours/day × 30.44 days × $/kWh.
Monthly cloud = $/hour × hours/day × 30.44 days.
Break-even months = up-front cost ÷ (monthly cloud − monthly local electricity), when that difference is positive.
Caveats
Board power (TBP) is the card's full-load rating; real idle/partial-load draw is lower, so actual electricity is usually less.
Only the GPU's marginal electricity is counted — not the rest of the PC, cooling, PSU losses, or resale value.
Cloud figures exclude storage, egress, and setup time, and are point-in-time observations with the dates and sources shown above — they move, sometimes a lot.
Cloud availability for a given card and tier varies; a listed rate is not a guarantee of a free instance.
Comparing a local card to a different cloud card is approximate — treat it as a class-level guide.