Northflank vs Runpod

Northflank

OpenAPI 3.0 with over 100 paths, enums and per_page, page and cursor on every list. No scale to zero for services; minimum instances must be at least 1.

Runpod

Per-second billing across more than a dozen serverless GPU classes, H100 at $4.79 and A100 80 GB at $2.72 an hour. Data-centre outages of 6 to 24 hours in each of July, August and September 2026.

Northflank

1. Issue the agent a team token under an API role limited to one project, not a personal token
2. Read x-ratelimit-remaining and wait x-ratelimit-reset seconds on a 429; the default is 1,000 calls an hour
3. Page lists with per_page up to 100 and the returned cursor instead of numbered pages
4. Use a job, not a service, for anything that finishes; services bill until paused or deleted
5. Fetch any docs page with .md appended to get Markdown

Runpod

1. Create a Restricted or Read Only key per endpoint for the agent, not an All key
2. Use REST v2 at api.runpod.io/v2 with a Bearer header; avoid GraphQL, which puts the key in the URL
3. Fetch /run results within 30 minutes and /runsync results within 1 minute, or they're gone
4. Call /retry on a failed job ID rather than submitting a duplicate job
5. Check /health before relying on an endpoint idle for a week, since max workers drop to 0