Market insights

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

September 16, 2025
9 mins read

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 $24.15/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 $3.09 GPU price list
AWS SageMaker A10G 24 GB $1.21 SageMaker pricing
AWS SageMaker A100 40 GB** $3.02 (must rent 8×) SageMaker ml.p4d.24xlarge

*U.S. East on-demand rates, September 2025.

**Effective per-GPU cost when you divide $24.15 by eight.

Five practical SageMaker alternatives

1. Thunder Compute

  • GPU focus: A100 40 GB and 80 GB nodes
  • Pay-as-you-go: $0.27–$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 $24.15/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 $3.09/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) → $13.60 Single A100 40 GB → $0.66
Two hours of SDXL image tests ml.g5.xlarge → $2.42 A100 40 GB → $1.32

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 tnr stop or one click in VS Code

Try Thunder Compute free

Ready to prototype? Create an account and access the cheapest A100s. Fire up an A100, open VS Code and start coding within minutes.

Looking for raw prices first? See the full Thunder Compute A100 pricing.

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