RTX 5090 by the hour, the minute or the second

Every listing quotes a price per hour, because that is how GPUs are compared. The billing unit is separate. It is the step in which your time is rounded up before the price is applied.

Billed by the second, a session of twelve minutes and ten seconds is charged as that. Billed by the minute, it is thirteen minutes. Billed by the hour, it is sixty.

A single consumer card is rented for short, uneven work: a test, a batch of images, a debugging session. The shorter the session, the larger the share of the bill that is rounding.

Agents and scripts make it sharper. A job that starts a card, runs for a few minutes and stops it, many times a day, pays the rounding every time.

Two details sit behind the unit. Some providers bill by the second with a minimum charge for each start. And a machine takes minutes to boot before you can use it.

Whether those minutes are billed is rarely on the price page. Test it. Start a card, wait until you can log in, stop it, and read the charge.

Look for the words per second, per minute or hourly on the pricing page and in the billing documentation. If neither says, treat the price as hourly until a bill shows otherwise.

Write the unit beside the price. Two RTX 5090 prices in different units are not yet comparable.

Runcrate bills by the second on most GPUs and by the minute on a few. Booting is never billed. Its CLI, SDK and MCP server let a script or an agent start and stop a card, so short runs are billed as short runs.

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