TL;DR
<ul><li><strong>Cost:</strong> Thunder Compute is ~4.4 times cheaper per GPU-hour.</li><li><strong>Billing:</strong> Thunder bills <strong>per second</strong>; Azure rounds up to whole minutes.</li><li><strong>Storage:</strong> Thunder persistent volumes start at <strong>$0.15/GB/mo</strong>; Azure Premium SSD is <strong>$0.18/GB/mo</strong>.</li><li><strong>Ease of use:</strong> One-click VS Code workspace, no quota tickets, swap CPU/RAM on the fly.</li></ul>
1. Raw GPU pricing
Azure Spot for the same SKU averages $1.145/hr (Vantage), but interruptions revoke your GPU with <30 s notice—unsuitable for fine-tuning runs that aren't checkpoint-safe.
2. Hidden line items
¹Thunder matches Azure's public egress rate only beyond the free tier.
3. Quotas and setup friction
<ul><li>New Azure subscriptions start with <strong>0 N-series vCPUs</strong>; you must file a GPU quota increase request.</li><li>Availability is region-limited—East US 2 and West Europe frequently show capacity errors.</li><li>Thunder Compute accounts spin up instantly with $10 free credit, no GPU quota tickets.</li></ul>
4. Developer experience
5. When is Azure still a fit?
<ul><li>Multi-GPU scale (>8 A100s) in a single VM via NC96ads A100 v4.</li><li>Co-locating with other Azure PaaS services for low-latency data pipelines.</li></ul>
For individual fine-tunes, model inference endpoints, and bursty hackathon workloads, Thunder Compute's pay-as-you-go model wins on both price and friction.
Conclusion
If you need a single A100 80 GB quickly, Thunder Compute costs $262 less per 100 GPU-hours and bills per minute of usage. Unless you're already locked into Azure's ecosystem or require massive multi-GPU nodes, switching cuts spend and setup time.