How the market works

San Francisco Compute is a market with buy orders and sell orders. To place an order, follow the instructions in the getting started page.

When you buy from SFC, you're buying a block of compute: some number of GPUs for some period of time. By default, that block starts now and runs for however long you'd like it to.

sf buy -d "1d" # buy for a day

Unlike a traditional GPU cloud, there is no single price per GPU hour. Instead, each block is priced independently. For example, a vendor may give you a cheaper price per gpu-hour if you buy 128 H100s for a month, but charge you more if you want 16 H100s for an hour.

If you want to figure out how much a block of compute costs, you can quote it.

sf buy -d "1d" --quote
# This order is projected to cost $393.6 total or $2.05 per GPU hour

In general, vendors do this because they want to reduce their inventory risk. If they only sell you an hour, who's going to buy the next hour? If they're not sure, they may give you a discount if you'll commit to buying for awhile. However, you may want a quick burst. It's not really in your interest to sign a longer reservation than you have to.

To solve this problem, San Francisco Compute can combine multiple peoples buys and sells together in order to make the transaction happen. You can think of it like a group purchase.

For example, imagine a vendor wants to sell some block of compute for $13. ACME AI is willing to buy some portion of it for $10. If you ask to buy the block at the end, the market will calculate how much you need to pay, based on the existing parties in play. In this case, that means it would cost you $3.

The simplest way to buy from SFC is to just go on the market and run sf buy. The market will quote you a price and you can either say yes or no. However, you can get much better prices by placing open orders a max price ("limit" orders). These orders just sit around waiting for someone to offer the price you want or better. If no one ever offers the price, the order gets canceled.

For the most part, this is a way to sell to folks who are trying to fire-sale their orders. Maybe someone's code didn't work, maybe a vendor bought more than they could sell, maybe someone just to have enough for peak and is selling in off hours; whatever the reason, someone is selling and they need to sell now.

To snipe those prices, you can add a -p price to your buy orders, like say, $0.25 an hour. After all, $0.25 an hour is more than 0!

sf buy -p 0.25