Cheap marketplaces leak privacy
Community GPU hosts like Runpod community and Vast.ai let hosts peek inside VMs, so valuable or sensitive workloads shouldn't run there.
Plenty of workloads don't need secrecy
Public data, academic work, inference on public outputs and product-specific models have little value to snoopers, so a fivefold discount is worth it.
Price gap reflects real differences
Big providers bundle InfiniBand, SLAs, compliance and availability; cheap hosts often have throttled GPUs, stale drivers and scarce high-VRAM capacity.