Renting vs Buying a GPU - which is actually better for Hashcat?

[NetRaccer]

I’ve been thinking about what makes more sense these days for Hashcat use — renting GPUs (cloud services, GPU farms, etc.) or buying your own hardware.
On one hand, renting gives instant access to powerful cards like the RTX 4090 or A100, without the upfront cost, electricity bills, or cooling issues.
On the other hand, if you’re running Hashcat regularly, the rental fees can quickly add up to the price of owning a GPU.
I’d love to hear what others think:

• Has anyone here tried running Hashcat on GPU rental services like vast.ai, runpod, or Lambda Labs? How stable and practical is it?
  
• At what usage level does buying a GPU become more cost-effective than renting?
  
• Overall, what do you consider the best balance between performance, price, and convenience right now?
  

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience or any numbers you’ve worked out!

[penguinkeeper]

"Has anyone here tried running Hashcat on GPU rental services like vast.ai, runpod, or Lambda Labs? How stable and practical is it?"
Yeah, a lot of us use vast.ai but only for highly bursty workloads and maybe competitions, not for general use. They're perfectly stable and practical, I've had very few problems with any kind of rental platforms

"At what usage level does buying a GPU become more cost-effective than renting?"
This depends on so many factors, your local market, the GPU you get, the cost of your electricity, the times that your rig will be active, if you need any other hardware etc but something to remember is that if you put $1000 into vast.ai, you will never see that money ever again. When you buy your own GPU, you can sell it at the end for half the cost on ebay or whatever, but you of course never get the electricity cost back so the maths is really quite difficult. Generally, buying gives you significantly more flexibility for what you can run casually like gaming or 3D modelling etc and is often significantly cheaper in the long term, while renting is a lot more flexible in terms of scaling up/down very quickly, with it probably being cheaper in the short term.

"Overall, what do you consider the best balance between performance, price, and convenience right now?"
As above - Long term = Buy, Short term = rent. What the definitions of "long" vs "short" term is, it depends a lot so unfortunately you'd have to do that maths yourself as you know your own local info far better than me