Manual GPU pricing has a fixed cost: your attention, several times a day, forever. This guide replaces it. In about three minutes you will connect your Vast.ai account, pick the machines to manage, set the one number the agent must never cross, and switch pricing over to automation that rechecks the market every few minutes.
What you need first
- A Vast.ai host account with at least one machine listed. Not there yet? Start with how to become a Vast.ai host.
- Your Vast.ai API key, created on the Vast.ai account settings page. The full walkthrough, including how to store it safely, is in how to create a Vast.ai API key.
- A rough idea of your hourly electricity cost. If you do not know it, the built-in Power Cost calculator will get you there in step 3.
Step 1: create an account and connect Vast.ai
- 1Register at gpuautopilot.com.
- 2Go to Settings, then Connected Marketplaces, and paste your Vast.ai API key. The key is encrypted at rest and used only to read machine status, read market data, and update your listing prices. Nothing is installed on your machines.
- 3GPU Autopilot discovers the machines on your account and shows them ready to configure.
Step 2: select machines and set your price floor
Click Add Machines on the Dashboard and pick the machines you want managed. Then set each machine's price floor: the lowest hourly price the agent will ever use, no matter what competitors do. This is the most important number in your whole setup.
Set the floor at or slightly above your break-even. The Power Cost page calculates it for you: enter your electricity rate in $/kWh, pick your system type for its overhead multiplier, confirm the pre-filled TDP for your GPUs, and read off your hourly cost. If the machine costs $0.12 per hour to run, a floor of $0.14 means you never rent at a loss, and the agent will still push above the floor whenever the market allows. Set it too high, on the other hand, and you have simply recreated the idle-machine problem with extra steps. The full break-even method is in how to set your price floor.
Two more per-machine settings worth a glance now:
- Region filter. Compete against Global, US Only, North America, or Europe listings. A US machine aimed at US renters does not need to race overseas prices down.
- Bid Offset. The gap the agent keeps between you and the cheapest comparable competitor. It moves your price both ways: down to stay in front when someone undercuts you, and back up toward the next competitor when you are already cheapest. It applies to your on-demand price, not your interruptible bid. The default works well to start.
Step 3: start the agent
Enable the toggle on each machine you want managed and complete checkout. Pricing is $5 per system per month, where a system is one machine regardless of GPU count. No contract, cancel anytime, and your settings survive if you ever pause and come back.
The agent begins working within a few minutes. From then on it runs every 2 to 3 minutes: it pulls live market data, looks at what renters are actually paying for your GPU type rather than what unsold listings ask, and repositions your price, with your floor and the platform safeguards enforced on every change.
Verify it is actually working
Open the Activity page. This is the agent's full audit trail, and it is the fastest way to confirm everything is wired up. Within the first several minutes you should see entries appearing for your machines:
- Updated means the agent changed your price based on market conditions, and the entry shows the market context it used.
- Held means it checked and your price was already right. Held entries are success, not silence.
- Failed entries point at a problem, most often an invalid API key. Check Settings if you see them repeatedly.
Set up alerts while you are here
Where to go from here
The defaults are deliberately sensible, and most hosts can stop here. When you want to tune further, three features are worth learning in order: the strategy modes that control how your fleet competes, covered in GPU Autopilot strategy modes, the Price Scheduler for day-of-week floor overrides, and the activity log filters for auditing exactly what the agent did and why. Every decision is deterministic and logged, so you can always reconstruct the reasoning behind any price you see.