Last updated: September 8, 2026
Your cloud bill
Paid directly to AWS, GCP, Azure, or whichever provider the machine belongs to. Kernpool never touches this money and takes no cut of it.
Kernpool management fee
A percentage of the public spot rate for the GPUs Kernpool schedules, deducted from your prepaid balance. This is the only thing we charge for the Service — the one other place money moves is a refund, and section 6 of the refund policy sets out when.
Rates work like tax brackets, not a single flat rate. The GPUs running at any given moment are ranked by their spot rate from highest to lowest, and each band is charged at its own rate.
| GPUs running at once | Fee on the spot rate in that band |
|---|---|
| 1 – 100 | 25% |
| 101 – 1,000 | 20% |
| 1,001 – 10,000 | 15% |
| 10,000+ | 12% |
What the fee is charged against. Kernpool prices every machine it schedules at the public spot rate for that accelerator in that region — including when you run on-demand or reserved capacity. Spot is the cheapest rate on the open market, so the figure we charge against is at or below what you actually paid, never above it. We do not read your provider's billing or cost APIs. Bands are worked out from the GPUs running at each moment of billing, not accumulated over a month.
Example: 150 GPUs running at once — 50 H200s at $3.20 and 100 H100s at $1.85 per GPU-hour. Ranked by cost, the first band takes the 50 H200s and 50 of the H100s at 25% ($63.12/hr); the other 50 H100s fall into the second band at 20% ($18.50/hr). That is $81.62 per hour against $345.00 of spot-priced compute — an effective rate of 23.7%.
The rate follows the fleet in real time. Scale the same fleet to 400 GPUs and a larger share sits in the 20% band, so the effective rate falls; scale down to 60 and everything is back in the 25% band.
| Band | Rate | Made up of | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 25% | 50×H200 + 50×H100 | $63.12/hr |
| 50 | 20% | 50×H100 | $18.50/hr |
Spot-priced compute
$345.00/hr
$251,850 if held for 30 days
Kernpool fee
$81.62/hr
$59,586 if held for 30 days
Effective rate
23.7%
across 150 GPUs
The hourly figure is what you are charged while this fleet is running. Band rates follow the fleet, so changing its size changes the rate. The 30-day line assumes it stays exactly as configured for 730 hours. Priced at public spot rates; your own cloud bill is separate and paid to your provider.
Balance is not cash you can withdraw at will, but it never expires and you are not under pressure to use it by any date. It is not exchangeable for cash, but if we stop serving you we return it in full. Metering errors and control-plane faults on our side are corrected either way. Full detail is in the refund policy.