Weekend Pricing With the Scheduler: Day-of-Week Floors

The problem with a single price floor

Your price floor is the number the pricing agent never goes below. It should be a deliberate figure built from your electricity cost and payback goals, and if you have not calculated yours yet, start with the guide on setting your price floor. The problem is that one floor has to serve two very different markets.

On weekdays, demand from professional workloads is strong enough that a firm floor rarely gets tested. On weekends, the whole market often drifts down, and if the clearing price falls below your floor, the agent does exactly what you told it to: it holds at the floor while cheaper machines take the rentals. A machine idle at $0.32 earns less than a machine rented at $0.26. That is the whole case for a schedule.

How the Price Scheduler works

The mechanics are deliberately simple:

• You enable specific days of the week and set an override floor for them, for example Friday through Sunday at a lower number.
• On scheduled days the agent uses the override floor. On every other day it uses your normal floor. Nothing else about the pricing logic changes: the agent still targets the rented median, still applies your bid offset, and still runs every few minutes.
• Day boundaries follow Central Time (America/Chicago), so a "Friday" override starts at midnight Central, not midnight in your local time zone.
• Every activation and deactivation is logged in the Activity feed with exact timestamps, so you can verify the switch happened when you expected.

Worked example: a weekend floor for an RTX 4090 rig

Say your weekday floor on a 4-card RTX 4090 machine is $0.32 per GPU hour, built from a $0.14/kWh electricity rate plus margin. Watching your activity feed over a month, you notice the same weekend pattern: rentals end Friday evening, the machine holds at $0.32, and it stays mostly idle until Monday.

1. 1Work out your true break-even. Suppose electricity for the machine is about $0.06 per GPU hour. Anything above that beats an idle weekend.
2. 2Pick a weekend floor between break-even and your weekday floor. $0.24 keeps a healthy margin over power while getting you under typical weekend clearing prices.
3. 3In the Price Scheduler, enable Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with a $0.24 override floor. Remember the days run on Central Time.
4. 4Check the Activity feed the following weekend for the Schedule On entry, then watch whether rentals that used to end on Friday now roll through Saturday.

The revenue math is straightforward. Four GPUs idle at a $0.32 floor earn $0 across a 60-hour weekend. The same four GPUs rented at $0.24 earn about $57 and keep your reliability and utilization numbers healthy. The override costs you nothing on weekdays because it simply is not active then.

Reading scheduler events in the Activity feed

Scheduler switches get their own action types in the log: Schedule On when an override floor engages and Schedule Off when the machine returns to its normal floor. This is worth checking during your first scheduled weekend for two reasons. First, it confirms the time zone behaves the way you expect relative to your own clock. Second, the entries around each switch show the market context, so you can see whether the lower floor actually changed the agent's behavior or whether the clearing price was above your normal floor anyway. The activity log guide covers how to read those entries in detail.

Beyond weekends: other schedules that earn

The Friday-to-Sunday override is the common case, but not the only one:

• Firm peak days. Run the schedule the other direction: keep a modest baseline floor and raise it on the days your Vast.ai rental history shows the strongest demand, so busy-day rentals never start from a bargain price.
• Maintenance mornings. If you patch machines on a fixed weekday, a higher floor that day makes short new rentals less likely to land right before your maintenance window.
• Seasonal experiments. Enable an override for a few weeks, compare rented hours in the activity feed against the prior period, and keep it only if the data agrees.

Treat every schedule as an experiment with a measurable result (rented hours) rather than a set-and-forget belief.

Where the scheduler fits in your strategy

The scheduler answers "when should my minimum change", but it sits on top of the bigger question of how hard your fleet competes in the first place. Once your weekend floors are running, read the guide on strategy modes to make sure the agent's day-to-day positioning matches each machine's role in your fleet.