What is the best Amazon SageMaker alternative for inexpensive prototyping?

Thunder Compute offers on-demand A100 GPUs from $0.57 per hour and a workflow similar to EC2, making it a strong SageMaker alternative for quick experiments, fine-tuning and notebook work.

How much cheaper is Thunder Compute than SageMaker?

Renting a single A100 40 GB on Thunder Compute costs $0.57 per hour. SageMaker requires an eight-GPU ml.p4d node that works out to about $1.70 per A100 per hour, so Thunder Compute can be more than 60 percent cheaper for the same hardware.

Does Thunder Compute provide free credits?

Yes. New users receive $20 in monthly credits that cover roughly 35 GPU hours on an A100 40 GB instance.

What GPUs are available on Thunder Compute?

Thunder Compute currently offers NVIDIA A100 40 GB and A100 80 GB cards, plus T4 GPUs for lighter workloads.

Can I run Jupyter or VS Code notebooks on Thunder Compute?

Yes. Thunder Compute has a VS Code extension that lets you open remote Jupyter notebooks or develop locally while executing on the cloud GPU.

Will I be billed when my instance is stopped?

No. Billing stops as soon as you suspend or shut down the instance, so there are no ongoing charges for idle notebooks or endpoints.

Back

SageMaker Alternatives: Cheaper Cloud GPUs for Data Science (May 2025)

Eight services that undercut SageMaker on price while matching its ease of use

Published:

May 19, 2025

Last updated:

May 19, 2025

Why look beyond SageMaker?

SageMaker is a managed ML platform, but you pay for that convenience in three ways:

Higher base instance rates. An A10G (ml.g5.xlarge) is $1.21/hr and an A100 (ml.p4d.24xlarge) costs $37.68/hr for the whole 8-GPU node — you cannot rent a single A100. (SageMaker pricing)
Always-on meters. Notebooks, endpoints and EBS storage keep billing until you shut them down.
Regional GPU scarcity. Popular U.S. regions often have long wait times.

If your goal is fast, low-cost prototyping, the five alternatives below beat SageMaker on per-GPU price and let you start with a single GPU.

Quick cost comparison

Provider	GPU model	On-demand price per GPU hour*	Notes / source
Thunder Compute	A100 80 GB	$0.78	Thunder Compute pricing
RunPod	A100 80 GB	$1.19	RunPod pricing
Lambda Cloud	A100 40 GB	$1.29	Lambda GPU Cloud
Paperspace	A100 40 GB	$1.15	GPU price list
AWS SageMaker	A10G 24 GB	$1.21	SageMaker pricing
AWS SageMaker	A100 40 GB**	$4.71 (must rent 8×)	SageMaker ml.p4d.24xlarge

*U.S. East on-demand rates, May 2025.
**Effective per-GPU cost when you divide $37.68 by eight.

Five practical SageMaker alternatives

1. Thunder Compute

GPU focus: A100 40 GB and 80 GB nodes.
Pay-as-you-go: $0.57–$0.78 per GPU hour.
Developer workflow: Spin up EC2-style SSH instances or use the free VS Code extension to run notebooks against remote GPUs from your laptop. Starter templates (Llama 4 fine-tune, Stable Diffusion XL, LoRA, etc.) replace SageMaker JumpStart.

2. Plain EC2 + open-source tooling

EC2 g5.xlarge (A10G) costs $1.01/hr and p4d.24xlarge $32.77/hr, but you avoid the SageMaker surcharge and can script everything with Terraform or Ansible.

3. Paperspace Gradient

Notebook-centric workflow with one-click A100 jobs. A100 40 GB is $1.15/hr and storage is bundled, so it is simpler than SageMaker endpoints.

4. Lambda GPU Cloud

Targets multi-GPU jobs but also rents single A100s at $1.29/hr. Their CLI feels similar to AWS CLI and supports spot pools.

5. RunPod

Community pool offers A100 80 GB from $1.19/hr with per-second billing and automatic Jupyter images. Useful for bursty weekend experiments.

Thunder Compute vs SageMaker: apples-to-apples A100 math

Scenario	SageMaker	Thunder Compute
Fine-tune Llama 3 8B for 45 min	Needs ml.p4d (8 × A100) → $28.26	Single A100 40 GB → $0.57
Two hours of SDXL image tests	ml.g5.xlarge → $2.42	A100 40 GB → $1.14

Result: Thunder Compute is 95%+ cheaper for short, single-GPU jobs.

Developer experience considerations

Feature	SageMaker	Thunder Compute
IDE in browser	SageMaker Studio	VS Code remote extension
Bring your own Docker	Limited, needs ECR	Any public/private image
Templates / JumpStart	Built-in	Notebook templates in console
Stop-billing toggle	Manual shutdown of Studio, endpoints, EBS	`thunder suspend` or console button