Billing

Overview

Vast requires pre-payment of credits for GPU rentals. Once credits are purchased, they appear in your account balance.

We accept credit card payments through Stripe and crypto payments through BitPay and Crypto.com. Use the add credit button to purchase credits one-time. Use the autobilling feature to have the system automatically top up your account using a saved credit card when it runs low.

Negative Balances

Once your credits reach $0.00, your instances, storage volumes, and data will be scheduled for deletion unless you add credits to make your balance positive again.

When your balance reaches zero (or below):

• Your instances are stopped automatically.
• While an instance is stopped, your instance is detached from its GPU(s), but your data can still be copied off the machine.
• As with any stopped instance, you will continue to be billed for disk storage — even if your balance is negative.
• To protect accounts with established usage history, the system allows a short grace period where your balance may go negative before deletion occurs — the length of this buffer is calculated based on your account’s average daily spend. Accounts with higher historical spend receive a proportionally larger buffer.

What happens next depends on whether you have a payment method on file:

• If you have a credit card saved:
  • Your credit card will be periodically and automatically charged to cover any negative balance.
  • This protects your instances from being deleted and allows you to resume them without losing data.
• If you do not have a credit card saved:
  • The system will have no backup payment method to charge, and will not be able to top up your balance.
  • Your instances and stored data will be destroyed to prevent indefinite unpaid usage.

Important: Instances showing in your account are never free, even if your balance is negative or zero.

Autobilling (credit card only)

Autobilling keeps your balance positive to protect your instances from interruption or deletion.

We recommend:

• Set your autobilling threshold to approximately your average daily or weekly spend
• Set a low balance email notification at around 75% of that threshold — this gives you an early warning if autobilling fails before your balance depletes to zero

WARNING

Even stopped instances continue to accrue storage charges. When your balance drops to your autobilling threshold or goes negative, your card will automatically be charged. Destroy instances you no longer need to avoid being charged for idle resources.

Even if you prefer to pay with crypto, saving a credit card as a backup payment method helps protect your instances from deletion if your balance reaches $0 or below.

Update Frequency

Balances are updated about once every few seconds.

Credit Card Security

Vast.ai does not see, store or process your credit card numbers, they are passed directly to Stripe (which you can verify in the javascript).

Refunds

After spending credits, there are absolutely no refunds.

For unspent credits, contact us on the website chat to request a refund. In most cases we can refund unspent credits. Unfortunately Coinbase Commerce does not support refunds, so there are no refunds possible for credits purchased via Coinbase Commerce (legacy).

Pricing

There are separate prices and charges for:

• Active rental (GPU) (in $/hr)
• Storage costs (in $/GB/hr)
• Bandwidth costs (in $/TB)

You are charged the base active rental cost for every second your instance is in the active/connected state. You are charged the storage cost (which depends on the size of your storage allocation) for every single second your instance exists and is online (for all states other than offline). Stopping an instance does not avoid storage costs.

You are charged bandwidth prices for every byte sent or received to or from the instance, regardless of what state it is in. The prices for base rental, storage, and bandwidth vary considerably from machine to machine, so make sure to check them.

You are not charged active rental or storage costs for instances that are currently offline.

To see a pricing breakdown on your current instances within your Instance page in the console or from offers on the Search page you can hover over the price to see pricing details.

Payment Methods

We currently support major credit cards through stripe, and crypto payments through BitPay and Crypto.com.

Billing Page Walkthrough

In this section we will walk through your billing page, which you can access from the Account section of your sidebar while logged into your Vast account.

Credits Panel

Here you can see the current amount of Vast credits you have. This section also shows what you are currently spending on instances and storage volumes.

Adding Credits

By clicking the Add Credits button in the credits panel, you can add payment methods, link accounts, and add credits to your Vast account.

Transfer Credits

From this section, you can transfer your personal credits to a different account or team.

Click the Transfer Credits button to open a pop-up. There, you can select the destination account or team to send the credit to.

• To transfer credit to another user, you will need their email address. ⚠️ This action is irreversible, so please double-check the email before proceeding.

• to transfer credit to a team, you should be a part of the team.

• To transfer credit from a team back to a personal account, you must be the team owner. You will need to switch to your team context and open Billing Page form there to see following pop-up.

Transaction History Table

At the bottom of your billing page, you will find an itemized table of your transactions on Vast. By default, the table is open to the Invoices tab, where you can see all manual and automatic billing records, as well as transfers and refunds.

You can also click the Charges tab to see an itemized table of all charges from your instances, storage volumes, and serverless workers. Clicking the dropdown arrow on any of these items will display a more complete breakdown of those charges by type, including GPU usage, reserved disk storage, and upload/download usage.

You can also use this table to generate an invoice for all charges or transactions created during a custom span of time by clicking the Export button in the top right corner of the table. You can see more details about how to customize this invoice in the following section.

Invoice Information

To customize your business or personal details on your Vast invoices, you can go to your Account Settings where you will find a section “Invoice Information.”

There you can add the your details to be shown on invoices you generate.

Here’s an example that shows where and how the invoice information appears on generated invoices:

If you leave your Invoice Info blank it will default to your Vast account’s email address for the “Bill To:” information.

Common Questions

If I rent a server and delete if after 10 minutes will I pay for 1 hour of usage or 10 minutes?

You will only be charged for the 10 minutes of usage.

Can I get a refund?

If you pay with credit card you can get a refund on unspent Vast credits. We do not refund Vast credits bought with crypto.

Why have the prices changed?

Pricing is set by the host and is specific to each offer. You can refine your search and look for a machine that suits your needs here.

Why am I getting the error “No such payment method id None.” when I try to add credit?

Before buying credit with Stripe you must add a card!

Am I charged for “Loading” instances?

No, you are not charged when it says “Loading”.

What happens if my account balance is negative?

Once your credits reach $0.00, your instances, storage volumes, and data will no longer be guaranteed, and will be at risk of deletion. If you have a saved credit card on file, your instances may persist and later be resumed once your balance is positive again.

Why am I getting charge more per hour than expected?

You may be see your Vast credit decline at a greater rate than expected due to upload and downloads costs, which is not shown in your $cost/hr or $cost/day pricing breakdowns as it is charged on a usage basis and not a constant rate. You can find these rates for bandwidth usage in the Internet: section of the pricing details, which you can see when you hover over the price in the bottom right-hand corner of instance cards within the Instance console page. You can also see pricing detail before instance creation from hovering over the prices on the Search page.