Cerebrium vs Crusoe Cloud

Cerebrium

Per-second GPU prices are public, a 94-operation OpenAPI spec covers the management API, and service account tokens expire and are limited to named projects. Deployed endpoints are callable without a token unless disable_auth = false is set, and no request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA were found in the reviewed documentation.

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.

Cerebrium

1. Set disable_auth = false in cerebrium.toml before deploying. The default leaves the endpoint callable by anyone with the URL
2. Authenticate headless with CEREBRIUM_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN. cerebrium login opens a browser
3. Raise response_grace_period for long work. It defaults to 15 minutes and async runs stop at 12 hours
4. Send ?async=true to get a run_id with HTTP 202, and add webhookEndpoint because async calls return no result to the caller
5. Check the plan before choosing hardware. A100, H100, H200, B200 and RTX PRO 6000 need Standard, and protected compute bills at twice the listed rate

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.