Beam
vs
Runpod
Beam covers serverless, on-demand machines and reserved clusters, while Runpod spans a wider GPU catalog that includes community-hosted capacity.
What's good about each
- Pay-per-millisecond billing, only while code is running
- Sub-second cold starts from memory snapshots
- No egress or bandwidth fees on any plan
- Runs in your own AWS, GCP or Azure account
- Recurring monthly credit on every plan
- Deploy affordable GPUs in under a minute
- Scale across 30+ regions worldwide
- SOC 2 Type II certified, 99.9% uptime SLA
- Flexible billing: pay by the second, no commitments
- Built-in deployments, autoscaling & monitoring
Price comparison
Closest matching configuration on each side, monthly list price in USD.
| Service | Beam | Runpod | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small VM | -- Not listed | $43.20 /mo 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM (Compute-Optimized) | |
| Medium VM | -- Not listed | $86.40 /mo 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM (Compute-Optimized) | |
| Large VM | -- Not listed | $172.80 /mo 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM (Compute-Optimized) | |
| Block storage | $2.10 /mo 100 GB beyond free allowance · First 1 TB included | $10.00 /mo 100 GB | 4.8x more expensive on Runpod |
| Egress allowance | Free and unlimited | Free and unlimited | |
| Egress | -- Not listed | Free and unlimited |
Heads up: Figures take each provider's closest plan to a common setup, and vary by region and usage. Hover a service for the reference configuration. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.
GPUs
Beam offers 10 GPU models, while Runpod offers 35. Cheapest listed price per GPU per hour; GPUs both providers sell come first.
| GPU | Beam | Runpod | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
H100
2 configs · 13 configs
|
$1.83 /GPU/hr On-demand | $2.59 /GPU/hr On-demand | 29% cheaper on Beam |
|
B300
1 config · 4 configs
|
-- On request | $7.89 /GPU/hr On-demand | |
|
B200
2 configs · 3 configs
|
$4.11 /GPU/hr On-demand | $6.79 /GPU/hr On-demand | 39% cheaper on Beam |
|
RTX PRO 6000
1 config · 7 configs
|
$1.09 /GPU/hr On-demand | $1.64 /GPU/hr On-demand | 34% cheaper on Beam |
|
H200
2 configs · 7 configs
|
$2.09 /GPU/hr On-demand | $4.59 /GPU/hr On-demand | 2.2x more expensive on Runpod |
|
RTX 5090
1 config · 7 configs
|
$0.72 /GPU/hr On-demand | $0.69 /GPU/hr On-demand | Within 5% |
|
A100
1 config · 11 configs
|
$1.36 /GPU/hr On-demand | $1.00 /GPU/hr On-demand | 26% cheaper on Runpod |
|
RTX 4090
1 config · 5 configs
|
$0.44 /GPU/hr On-demand | $0.34 /GPU/hr On-demand | 23% cheaper on Runpod |
|
L40S
1 config · 7 configs
|
$0.76 /GPU/hr On-demand | $0.79 /GPU/hr On-demand | Within 5% |
|
RTX A6000
1 config · 4 configs
|
$0.54 /GPU/hr On-demand | $0.53 /GPU/hr On-demand | Within 5% |
Beam bills on-demand; Runpod bills on-demand. The line under each price names the billing type shown.
Services
Managed services each provider offers.
Company details
| Fact | Beam | Runpod |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2021 | 2022 |
| Headquarters | USA | USA |
| Locations | -- | 32 |
| Example customers | Coke, Ogilvy, EdgeImpulse, Magellan AI, Geospy, Frase | Zillow, CivitAI, Wix, OpenAI, Perplexity, Cursor |
| Website | www.beam.cloud | www.runpod.io |
Alternatives to consider
Compare Beam and Runpod against other cloud providers.
Our data for Beam was last updated on Sept. 14, 2026, and for Runpod on Sept. 14, 2026.