The billing unit: second, minute or hour

The hourly price is a rate. The unit is how the provider rounds your time before applying it. By the second, a run of ten minutes and twenty seconds is charged as that. By the minute, it becomes eleven minutes. By the hour, it becomes an hour.

On an expensive card the rounding is real money. On 12 Nov 2026, the median listed B300 price here was $9.25 per GPU-hour. An hour paid for and not used is not small change on a card like that.

A review should record three more things. Is there a minimum charge for each start, such as the first minute or the first hour? Are the minutes a machine takes to boot billed? And does a stopped machine keep costing money for its disk?

None of the three is usually on the price page. They are in the billing documentation, or they are found by testing.

Start the smallest machine. Wait until you can log in. Run nothing. Stop it after a few minutes and read the charge. Divide the charge by the hourly rate. The result tells you the unit, the minimum and whether booting was billed.

Write the result down with the date. Billing rules change less often than prices, but they do change.

The unit matters most for short and uneven work: development loops, evaluation runs, and agents that start and stop machines many times a day. It matters least for a training run that lasts days, where the hourly rate is nearly the whole bill.

Inference that scales with traffic sits between the two. The more often machines start and stop, the more a small unit saves.

In one line: the unit, the minimum charge for each start, and whether booting is billed. If the provider does not publish one of the three, the review should say that it was not found, and not fill the gap with a guess.

Runcrate bills by the second on most GPUs and by the minute on a few. Booting is never billed. One prepaid balance pays for GPUs, models and storage, so the unit you read is the unit you are charged in.

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