R 
RunPod
On-demand and serverless GPU cloud priced well below the hyperscalers.
NOT REALLY
why this verdict
Keep it — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the dev tools job, so this one is still worth keeping open.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Hosted model APIs removing the reason for most teams to rent a GPU at all. OpenAI, September 25, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? paid only
- 3 replacements listed, all paid.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
Reason composed from the fields above missing: announcement linked missing: free replacement listed recorded: two or more escape hatches
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- September 25, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
RunPod rents GPUs by the second, from a spot-priced community pool to dedicated instances, which made experimentation affordable for people who could not sign an enterprise cloud contract. Hosted APIs remove the need for a GPU for most application work. The workloads that stay are training, fine-tuning, image and video generation, and anything where a per-token API is the wrong shape entirely, and the generative video boom made that a much larger pool than it was.
