Pick FriendliAI if
inference teams who will start on Model APIs (pay per token) and only open Dedicated when they need a pinned H100 at $5/hr — not a team looking for a $20 chat plan.
Read the FriendliAI pageFriendliAI vs Runpod
Our take
Pick FriendliAI if inference teams who will start on Model APIs (pay per token) and only open Dedicated when they need a pinned H100 at $5/hr — not a team looking for a $20 chat plan. Pick Runpod if engineers who will pick a GPU row and pay by the second. Skip Runpod if teams that want a managed Ray workspace instead of a raw container (Anyscale).
Best for
FriendliAI Serve tokens (or audio seconds) on published $/hr or per-token rates
Runpod Rent a GPU by the second
Free plan
FriendliAI No free plan
Runpod No free plan
Lowest paid
FriendliAI Dedicated on-demand $4.0
Runpod RTX A5000 $0.27
Next step up
FriendliAI
Runpod RTX 4090 $0.89
Watch out
FriendliAI Model API token dollars are per-model and JS-rendered
Runpod You pay while the Pod exists
Last checked
FriendliAI 2026-10-22 · friendli.ai/pricing
Runpod 2026-10-22 · runpod.io/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Runpod if
engineers who will pick a GPU row and pay by the second.
Read the Runpod page