Beam vs Lambda 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.

Lambda Cloud

H100 SXM at $3.99 and B200 at $6.69 an hour with per-minute billing. No scale to zero, autoscaling or endpoints; an idle VM bills until terminated.

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

Lambda Cloud

1. Call GET /instance-types first and read regions_with_capacity_available before trying to launch
2. Space launch calls 12 seconds apart; a sixth in a minute returns 429 with global/rate-limited
3. Branch on the error code, not the message or suggestion, which Lambda says may change
4. List instances before retrying a failed launch, since there's no idempotency key and a retry can start a second machine
5. Terminate the instance in a finally block; billing runs by the minute until you do