RunpodReviews of runpod.io

Very dodgy platform. They offer some templates to get you started but quickly show to be charging you daily small amounts that are very unclear as to their origins. They will charge you for a storage volume on a hibernating pod that you aren't using and they don't show that cost when you look at the costs of the pod. 3 times already I've had to return to my account to find all my pods paused but my credits drained due to this. You have to go and do detective work to find out what's draining your credits. There are parts of this service that are nice to work with but these types of practices are not a one-off issue. It's very clear that this is a consistent way for them to drain your cash which is sad cause I'd rather use those credits to actually use the pods.

Prices are increasing while availability is decreasing. And the site still needs work. It shows you available GPU that aren't.

It was really good initially, but lately none of the cheap community or security pods available, I subscribed to runpods because they have plenty of good pods available most of the times like less that $0.19 per hr. But looks like thats not the case anymore.

Sorry, but it was hit and miss. We'll likely reconsider our plans and possibly switch to a different cloud provider for our project as the experience was terrible. It is quite a common problem for pods to have very slow network speeds, causing long pod start ups (>20 minutes) despite small Docker images (<2 GB). Sometimes, the spawned GPU pods didn't have OPTIX available, sometimes they didn't even have CUDA! So, basically broken pods. And these were "Secure cloud" pods. I hardly imagine how this quality can be considered acceptable for a cloud provider.

RunPod can deliver strong performance when everything works — but that’s the problem: far too often, it doesn’t. Pod performance is inconsistent. I’ve had H100 pods run at roughly half their usual speed, which quickly becomes expensive when billed by the hour. This is not a rare edge case. Persistent storage is another major issue. You pay to keep pod data alive even when the pod is stopped, yet very frequently those pods cannot be restarted, forcing you to create a new one and effectively wasting the storage fees. The platform is also not beginner-friendly. Accessing persisted data is unnecessarily complicated, and when something goes wrong it can be difficult to even locate the data you’re paying to keep. Infrastructure issues make things worse: uploads sometimes fail entirely or are painfully slow, and these situations are often followed by sub-par pod performance — compounding lost time and money. Support is polite, but refunds for technical problems are mostly symbolic. Overall: usable if you can tolerate downtime and rework, but not reliable enough for serious, time-sensitive projects.

The documentation for a lot of stuff seems not very up to date/is worded terribly/not detailed enough. Never seen a website that doesn't have up to date documentation. There's issues I have run into where I have fed page by page every single relevant piece of documentation to gemini 2.5 + Gpt 5 and ill spend half an hour troubleshooting and end up with just 10 more questions on how they thought running their website the way they do was a great idea. To clarify, I am pretty new to using cloud GPU rentals, but I am not new to using docker or comfyUI, and this has still been a major headache. Despite all of that though, when I do get stuff to run it works great, so if you can get it to work definitely a quality service.

When you create a pod, they only list per-hour usage prices, so one assumes this is all that is going to be charged, but if you stop a pod without deleting it, you will be charged for daily storage without a warning. My classmates and I were all caught off-guard with low-balance warning emails days after testing this service for a few minutes.

Extremely difficult system. I feel that I am back in the 1980s. All is DOS based. And ports closing all the time. File handling is impossible. Support I don't know about because I have to fill out many pages for a small question. I will not recommend. Until now I have used 2 weeks to download a backup file. I give up