Is cloud rendering cheaper than buying a render workstation?

It depends on how many hours a month you actually render. Renting costs nothing when you're not using it and a fixed rate when you are; a workstation you buy costs the same whether it renders or not. Divide the price of the machine you'd buy by the hourly rate: that's how many rented hours add up to buying it. At $5.99/hr for an RTX 5080, a $6,000 machine (our own estimate for one like ours) equals about 1,002 rented hours. If you'd render far fewer hours than that over the machine's working life, renting is cheaper. If you'd render far more, buying is.

The break-even, as a formula you can fill in

Comparisons of cloud and workstation rendering usually go wrong because they compare a price with a rate. A workstation is one payment you spread over years. A cloud workstation is time: you pay for the minutes you use. To compare them you need one number from each side, in the same unit.

Break-even hours        price of the machine ÷ hourly rate
Months to break even    break-even hours ÷ hours you render a month
Cost of one owned hour  price of the machine ÷ (months you keep it × hours a month)

For the price, use a real quote for the machine you would actually buy, from your own supplier, in your own currency. The fair comparison is a desktop in the same class as the rented one: here, an RTX 5080 with 16 GB GDDR7, 64 GB of RAM and an 8-core, 16-thread high-performance CPU. For the hours, count only the time the GPU is genuinely needed: rendering, real-time walkthroughs, look development. Modelling and drawings usually run fine on the computer you already have.

For the rate, ours is $5.99/hr, or $0.10 a minute, one all-in price. It's billed per minute from the moment the stream starts, and preparing the machine, uploading files and failed connections cost nothing.

A worked example at today's rate

The table below uses our own estimate of $6,000 for a machine like ours, because a worked example needs a number. Replace it with your quote: if your quote is lower, every figure in the last column gets shorter in proportion.

Read across your own row. If the last column is longer than you would keep the machine before replacing it, renting is the cheaper way to get those hours. If it's much shorter, buying is.

What an owned hour really costs

The same sum, turned around, gives the price of each hour you use a machine you own. It falls the more you use it. The table assumes you keep the machine for three years; change that to whatever your practice actually does.

That figure is the floor, not the full cost of owning. Add electricity (the machine's power draw under load in kilowatts × hours a month × your tariff), a UPS, repairs, and the hours someone spends on drivers and updates. Take off whatever the machine is worth when you sell it. The rented rate already includes the power, the hardware and its upkeep.

Pay monthly or pay as you go?

If you'd rather budget a fixed amount each month than top up a wallet, a monthly plan is the other way to rent. Each plan bundles a block of GPU hours with shared storage and named seats. The sum is the same idea: divide the monthly fee by the pay-as-you-go rate to find the hours at which the plan starts to cost less.

So a team that renders fewer than about 35 hours a month in total is better off paying as it goes, and one that reliably renders more saves with Small Team, which also bills any hours over the allowance below the pay-as-you-go rate. A plan is a commitment for its full term, so base the choice on your quiet months, not your busiest one. The plans are on the pricing page and Team plans.

How to compare cloud rendering prices fairly

Hourly rates from different providers aren't comparable until you line up what each hour buys. Before putting two prices side by side, check:

• The GPU and its video memory. A cheaper hour on a card with less VRAM is no saving if your scene doesn't fit. Ours is an RTX 5080 with 16 GB GDDR7; this guide explains why the memory figure matters.
• The billing unit. Per minute, per started hour or per block of hours give very different totals for short sessions.
• Whether the whole machine is yours, or a share of one.
• What the price includes: storage for your project files, setup fees and any monthly minimum.
• Whether you can drive the machine yourself or only submit finished jobs. A render farm prices a finished job, not an hour at a desktop, so it is a different comparison: see cloud workstation vs render farm.
• Where the machines are. Distance adds lag to a streamed desktop.

When buying is the better deal, and when renting is

Many studios do both: an owned machine for the person who renders every day, and rented ones for deadline weeks. For the full picture with render farms added, see what each option really costs.