Spot pricing offers significantly reduced hourly rates — often 30-70% below on-demand — in exchange for the marketplace's right to reclaim the GPU when capacity is needed elsewhere. Reclamation typically comes with a few-minute warning before forcible termination.
Spot is ideal for workloads with checkpointing (most ML training jobs), batch processing, or any compute that tolerates interruption gracefully. It's poorly suited for stateful production services where unexpected termination would cause user-facing issues.
Spot prices fluctuate with marketplace supply and demand. AIMC's canonical price comparisons exclude spot tiers because the volatility and reclamation risk make direct comparison with on-demand misleading. Partners that expose spot pricing are tracked separately in the underlying schema.