Your cloud should compete for your business.
AWS sets the price. On Akash, providers bid for yours.
The Core Economics
AWS prices compute to cover datacenters, global operations, a support organization, and a margin target. You pay for all of it on every instance-hour, whether or not you touch the services around it. That's the Cloud Tax.
Akash removed it. Providers with real hardware bid against each other for your workload, so you pay what compute costs when the market clears, not what a rate card says. Zero egress fees.
Here's what that costs you: nothing you can look up on a rate card. Prices move as providers compete and as more capacity joins the network. See what the market is charging right now on the GPU pricing page.
| AWS | Akash | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Published rate card, set by region | Set by competitive bids, per deployment |
| Egress | Billed per GB | Zero |
| GPU access | Quota request, capacity reservation | Describe what you need, get bids in seconds |
| Commitment | On-demand, Savings Plans, RIs | None. Close the lease whenever you want |
Architectural Distinctions
Skip the capacity request
Getting H100 or A100 capacity on AWS means a quota increase, a capacity reservation, and often a conversation with an account team. On Akash you describe what you need and providers around the world compete for the workload. Bids come back in seconds. No waitlist, no approval, no "we'll get back to you."
Your data isn't collateral
Moving data out of AWS is metered per gigabyte, which is exactly why multi-cloud plans stall and datasets stay where they landed. Akash providers include bandwidth in the bid. Move your model weights, checkpoints, and training logs whenever you want — the cost of leaving is never a reason to stay.
Service Parity Index
If it runs in Docker, it runs on Akash. No proprietary runtime, no rewrite, no SDK you've never heard of.
| Infrastructure tier | AWS | On Akash | How it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | EC2 | Standard containers | Your image runs on provider hardware. No AMIs, no instance families. |
| GPU capacity | P4d / P5 instance classes | The marketplace | H100 and A100 class hardware by the hour, without a reservation. |
| Persistent storage | EBS | Persistent volumes on the lease | Requested in the deployment file, attached to the container. |
| Public addressing | Elastic IP | IP leases | A stable public IPv4 endpoint bound to your workload across updates. |
| Infrastructure code | CloudFormation, CDK | SDL | One portable YAML file. If you've touched Docker Compose, this will feel familiar. |
| Confidential compute | Nitro Enclaves | One line in your SDL | tee: cpu or tee: cpu-gpu runs your workload in an AMD SEV-SNP or Intel TDX enclave. |
What We Are. What We Aren't.
Akash doesn't have a centralized SLA, because we aren't a centralized provider. We're a marketplace. Here's what that costs you.
No managed services
There's no RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, or Lambda here. You run Postgres, Redis, a queue, or a function runtime as containers you operate. If your team already runs its own data layer, that's a saving. If you leaned on managed services, that's real work you're taking back.
No scale-to-zero
Leases run continuously. There's no request-triggered cold start primitive. Run OpenFaaS or Knative inside a lease, or keep that tier where it is.
You choose your level of reliability by choosing your provider
The marketplace organizes providers by tier: Verified Enterprise data centers with redundant power and networking, and Community Independent operators optimized for price. Filter by tier and deploy with confidence. For workloads that need a signed SLA from a single vendor, AWS might still be the right call. We'd rather tell you that now than have you find out after you've migrated.
FAQs
With the right setup, yes. Uptime on Akash is a property of the provider you leased from, so production teams deploy on Verified Enterprise providers, run more than one lease, and load-balance across them. Venice.ai and Prime Intellect serve production traffic this way. A single lease with no redundancy behaves like a single instance with no redundancy — which is also true on EC2, just with an SLA attached.
No. Deploy in dollars. Akash Console takes a credit card and bills in USD, the same as any other SaaS tool, and the Console API authenticates with a standard API key. Sign up with GitHub or email, add a card, and ship. No wallet, no seed phrase, no token.
Console Air is the self-custody path: connect your own wallet and sign every transaction yourself. The network also supports USDC and AKT for teams that want on-chain sovereignty — that's an upgrade, not an entry requirement. Protocol-powered, not crypto-complicated.
The lease ends and the workload stops. Akash doesn't migrate a running container to another provider automatically — recovery is a redeploy through the CLI or API, which takes about as long as the first deployment did. Persistent volumes live with the provider, so checkpoint anything you can't lose to external storage, the same way you would on a spot instance.
Start Building
Move the workloads that don't need a managed-services catalog and pay the market's clearing price for them.