Best GPU provider for fine-tuning

A fine-tuning job is shorter than training from scratch and longer than a test. It often runs for an hour or a few, on one card, and is repeated many times with different settings.

So the provider should rent one card, not a node. It should bill in small units, because a job of seventy minutes billed by the hour costs two hours. And it should keep your files between runs.

Memory decides. The base model, the adapter and the batch must fit on the card together. The H200 has 141 GB and the RTX Pro 6000 has 96 GB. Pick the smaller one if the job fits.

On 12 Nov 2026, 15 providers listed an on-demand H200 price. The lowest was $3.49 per GPU-hour and the median $5.40.

The cost of one run is the hourly rate times the time the machine was up, rounded to the billing unit. Setup counts too. Minutes spent installing libraries and downloading the base model are GPU minutes.

A ready image and a volume with the model already on it cut that setup to almost nothing. Over twenty runs, that saving is larger than most price differences.

Check that a single card can be started today. Check the billing unit and whether booting is billed. Check that a volume can be attached to a new machine, so the next run starts where the last one ended.

Check the tools as well. Fine-tuning is a loop: change a setting, run, read the result, run again. If each turn of the loop needs a console, you will run fewer of them. A command line tool or an SDK lets a script do the starting and stopping.

Runcrate bills by the second on most GPUs and never bills booting. Its Finetune crate is a ready image for this work, and volumes keep files between instances. Runcrate can start an H200 now from $4.67 per GPU-hour.

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