Undercutting is easy to automate and easy to get wrong. A script that only knows how to go lower will happily follow a price war all the way to your floor and stay there after the war ends. Bid Offset is a different idea: it is the gap the agent maintains between you and the cheapest comparable competitor, and it moves your price in both directions.
What Bid Offset actually is
Bid Offset is the distance the agent keeps between your price and the cheapest comparable competitor, measured downward from their price. With a $0.01 offset and a competitor at $0.35, your price is $0.34. The gap is always taken off the competitor's price, never added on top of yours, and it applies to your on-demand price, not your interruptible bid.
Three properties make it more than a discount knob:
- It is relative, not absolute. You configure a gap, and the agent recomputes the resulting price every few minutes as competitors come and go.
- It moves both ways. Down to stay in front when someone undercuts you, and back up to sit just under the next machine when the cheap competitor disappears. You are never stranded at your floor after the competition clears.
- It respects context. The agent undercuts when a cheaper competitor sits below the market median of rented machines. When you are already the cheapest, the correct move is up, not down.
A worked example, both directions
A verified RTX 5090, rented 5090s clearing around $0.40 per hour, your Bid Offset set to $0.01:
| Market event | Cheapest competitor | Your price |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor lists at $0.35 | $0.35 | $0.34, one cent in front |
| Competitor drops to $0.32 | $0.32 | $0.31, still one cent in front |
| Competitor gets rented, leaves the list | next machine at $0.41 | raises back toward $0.40 |
| New supply floods in at $0.30 | $0.30 | $0.29, unless that breaks your floor |
Row three is the whole argument for the mechanism. A one-way undercutting script would still be sitting at $0.31 after the cheap competitor left, donating $0.09 per hour to every renter who would have paid the clearing price. The offset logic notices the market changed and recovers the margin without you touching anything.
The floor always wins
Choosing an offset that earns instead of bleeds
The offset is a trade between visibility and margin. Some guidelines:
- Start at one cent. Sort order is binary: you are either in front of the competitor or behind them. A $0.01 gap buys the same position as a $0.05 gap and costs $0.04 less on every rented hour. Over a month of solid utilization on one card, that difference is roughly $29.
- Widen it only for a reason. A machine with a weaker reliability score or thinner bandwidth than the competition may need a visibly better price, not a technically better one, to win the click.
- Do not use it to express pessimism. If you feel the urge to set a huge offset because your machine never rents, the problem is usually somewhere else: storage pricing, verification, or ports, not the last few cents of hourly rate.
What happens when two agents meet
A fair question: if every host automates undercutting, does the market not just spiral to everyone's floor? Two things stop that. First, the undercutting rule is conditional: the agent undercuts a competitor sitting below the median of rented prices, because that is a competitor actually threatening your sort position with a price renters would take. It is not chasing every number on the board downward for sport. Second, floors are hard stops, and hosts have different floors. When a price war does break out, it ends at the highest floor among the combatants, and the moment the cheap machines get rented, which is exactly what cheap prices cause, the survivors reprice upward toward the clearing price. Downturns are self-limiting in a way that pure undercut-only scripts never are.
What Bid Offset does not do
- It does not touch your interruptible bid. Spot pricing is managed separately, as a percentage discount below on-demand or a fixed manual price.
- It does not override your floor or the platform safeguards that bound every price write.
- It does not decide which machines you are compared against. That is the job of your region filter and your strategy mode.
- It does not change anything on the Vast.ai side beyond the listed price itself. Listing mechanics, verification, and search behavior are documented in the Vast.ai docs.
Tune the comparison, not just the gap
An offset is only as good as the set of competitors it is measured against. Comparing a datacenter machine against every consumer rig with the same GPU name, or a 4x rig against single-card listings, distorts the gap you are so carefully maintaining. That comparison set is exactly what strategy modes control, and it is the next thing to configure after your offset. Read GPU Autopilot strategy modes to pick the market your machine should compete in, and asking price vs rented price for the data source underneath all of it.