[Youden]

The big question is the pricing and whether it really does make sense to pay for your service instead of purchasing hardware.

Your pricing is $0.0019 per Octane hour. IIUC, that means that an hour of time on an RTX3070 - scoring 400 - costs $0.76. Cost of an RTX3070 right now is about $550 on Amazon and with a TDP of 220W and an average price (in the US) of $0.15/kWh, the total cost will be $550 + <hours> * $0.15 * 0.22.

Given that, the break even is 757h, which is unexpectedly high.

Do you think your pricing is sustainable?

EDIT: To be clear, I'm aware of the model of using "spare" GPUs, my calculations were just for a point of comparison. What I'm asking is whether, with such low pricing, the company will have enough income to be long-term profitable.

[dasokol112358]

Thank you for your question! We believe our pricing is competitive and tends to be one of our strong points, along with our speed. We charge considerably less than most other rendering services. Our farm will also render your projects much faster than a single RTX 3070 can render them.

For artists/studios who do a ton of rendering, it may be worth it for them to buy up many graphics cards and create their own private render farm. However, this requires considerable up-front cost as well as a lot of technical expertise, which many simply don't have. For a lot of them, it's a much better deal to render with rentaflop and not have the headache and cost of managing hardware.

[gabereiser]

I want to emphasize something here. Artists in general are not technical. Many don’t have the knowledge and skills to build their own render farm. This is why services like yours exist. Don’t listen to people trying to work the economics of build vs buy when a studio doesn’t have the technical chops to run their own. If they did, they would. Some do. Most don’t. If you’re a Disney/Pixar or VFX shop you probably have it. If you are a freelance artist, you probably don’t.

Considering that Blender is being used more and more for high production shots, you’ll be happy services like this exist. At least until you release your feature.

Keep going. Folks who can build their own render farm, will, but the vast majority of artists won’t.

[Youden]

What I mean isn't whether the price is competitive, I believe it absolutely is, what I mean is can you run a profitable and scalable company with that kind of pricing?

Recruiting spare gamers' GPUs is one thing - those people bought the GPU anyway, so as long as you pay more than they pay for power, they're happy - but I imagine that's a relatively small pool of GPUs.

At some point, you'll run out of those people, so I guess what I'm asking is whether the price you charge now is high enough that investors could profitably build and run their own "mining" hardware , while you still get enough of a cut to run your service.

[dasokol112358]

Ah, I understand now. I believe there are enough private GPU owners around to sustain and scale rentaflop for many years to come. For instance, did you know there were around 10 million GPUs mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency at its peak? Our current prices allow our hosts to earn ~10x what crypto mining pays whenever they're processing rendering tasks for rentaflop. There are millions more GPUs owned by gamers, AI hobbyists, businesses, etc. that we hope to leverage to make 3D rendering more accessible to artists. If we manage to attract even a tiny fraction of these, we stand a chance at becoming the fastest and most affordable render farm on the planet.

[parker_mountain]

> Do you think your pricing is sustainable?

I think you're kind of missing the point. Most non-professional artists (which there's a lot of!) won't need to come close to the break even point. When I was doing modeling and speed painting in school, I probably used about 80 render hours a year on our farm. I never "went" professional, but I can imagine that smaller shops probably aren't spending that much time doing deliverable renders. I bet a lot of small shops with a small farm under the desk are going to sign up to be providers for this as well.

Not to mention, you're talking about one GPU :) That's very slow. You really need to consider that for complex scenes, having twelve GPUs running for five minutes is way more convenient than one GPU running for an hour. Now, suddenly, that changes the math significantly - you're talking about buying 4x gpus (and the "sleds" required to run them - another $600 or so).

[kfarr]

The true cost of hardware is greater than the purchase price of the hardware. It's not feasible for everyone to buy hardware, esp. for intermittent load.

[BoorishBears]

It seems like you missed the entire part where they're not buying 3070s...

People who already bought 3070s and would otherwise not be using them are providing the compute, so they don't need a realistic breakeven on an entire 3070. They essentially need to breakeven on electricity for the owner.

Also they're not charging .0019 per Octane hour, it's per _ Octanebench hour_. One GPU can provide more than 1 Octanebench hour of compute.

Compare their pricing to the rest of the market and you'll see it's not unreasonably cheap: https://garagefarm.net/blog/garagefarm-net-adds-gpu-renderin...

[KennyBlanken]

> Cost of an RTX3070 right now is about $550 on Amazon

The GPU market is beyond saturated, with prices crashing. There are predictions of new 3090's being $500 in 6 months as NVIDIA and their partners get desperate to offload 3000 series inventory to make room for 4000 series cards.

Everyone and their cousin has a gaming PC now and even if a service like this were to take off, they'd have no shortage of suppliers (and competitors) and thus prices will plunge.

I can't see this being a sustainable business model past 6-9 months from now.