Lambda Cloud vs Verda

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.

Verda

The REST API has a public OpenAPI 3.1 document, a dated changelog, published rate limits with Retry-After, and an audit log endpoint. The CLI's MCP server refuses billed or destructive calls without confirm: true. Access needs a browser signup and a prepaid balance, credentials carry one scope, and instance creation has no idempotency key.

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

Verda

1. Exchange the client ID and secret at POST /v1/oauth2/token, then send the access token as a Bearer header. It expires after 3,600 seconds, so refresh it.
2. Send location_code on every create call. Requests without it have returned 400 since March 2026.
3. Call GET /v1/instance-availability before launching. POST /v1/instances returns 503 service_unavailable when the location has no capacity.
4. List instances before retrying a failed launch, because create has no idempotency key.
5. Use the delete action to stop charges. shutdown keeps billing, and deleted volumes stay recoverable for 96 hours unless delete_permanently is set.