Beam vs Crusoe Cloud

Beam

Per-millisecond billing with cold starts and image pulls free, H100 PCIe at $3.50 and RTX 4090 at $0.69 an hour. No published request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA.

Crusoe Cloud

The v1 REST API has a published OpenAPI description, Markdown docs, HMAC-signed keys, reader roles and a 90-day audit log, with on-demand GPU prices public. No idempotency keys or control-plane rate limits were found, spot and B200 prices go through sales, and a storage outage in eu-norway1 lasted about four hours on 29 September 2026.

Beam

1. Check the response body for ok: false on gateway calls; a failure can arrive as HTTP 200
2. Don't pipe beam deploy --format json output into CI logs, since it contains the workspace token
3. Route anything over 180 seconds to a task queue and poll the task instead of holding the endpoint request
4. Set keep_warm_seconds deliberately; the 180-second endpoint default bills three minutes of GPU after every call
5. Pass gpu=["RTX4090", "A10G"] so a job still schedules when one type is out

Crusoe Cloud

1. Sign every request. Build the payload from path, sorted query string, verb and X-Crusoe-Timestamp, HMAC-SHA256 it with the base64url-decoded secret, and send Authorization: Bearer 1.0:<access_key_id>:<signature>.
2. Use https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1. Some docs pages and the MCP server still name api.crusoecloud.com and /v1alpha5.
3. Creates, updates and deletes return an operation. Poll the matching operations endpoint for state, and list existing resources by name before retrying a create, because no idempotency key was found.
4. Managed AI uses separate Intelligence API keys and hosts, api.inference.crusoecloud.com for OpenAI-compatible calls and api.intelligence.crusoecloud.com for files and fine-tuning jobs.
5. Delete a VM and its disks to stop charges. A stopped on-demand VM is not billed for compute, but its 128 GB OS disk still bills at $0.08 a GiB-month.