Renting Strangers' GPUs by the Minute: The vast.ai Experiment

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0530

The free-egress move had rescued the NGO’s unit economics and, in the same stroke, handed me back a problem I thought I’d permanently outsourced: transcoding. Wasabi wasn’t real AWS S3, so AWS MediaConvert couldn’t read from it, which meant I was back to encoding video myself with plain ffmpeg — on CPU boxes that could clear maybe 30 to 40 videos a day against an inbound firehose of 150-plus. I needed GPU-speed encoding. I owned zero GPUs. And I worked for an organization that had just spent a week panicking about a four-figure CDN bill, so “let me buy a rack of NVIDIA cards” was not a sentence I could say out loud in a budget meeting.

Vast-Ai on Kuldeep Pisda

Renting Strangers' GPUs by the Minute: The vast.ai Experiment