Runpod vs Thunder Compute

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.

Thunder Compute

The hosted MCP server signs in with OAuth and separate read and write scopes, and the REST API has a public OpenAPI 3.1 document with keyless price and availability endpoints. No rate limits, SLA or API changelog were found, instance creation has no idempotency key, and instances cannot be stopped, only deleted.

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

Thunder Compute

1. Call GET /v2/status or the get_availability tool before creating an instance. Availability can change before launch, and creation fails when a type is sold out.
2. List instances before retrying a failed create, because the call has no idempotency key.
3. Pass public_key on create. If omitted, the response carries a generated private key that is returned once.
4. To pause work, create a snapshot, delete the instance and later create a new instance from the snapshot. Snapshot storage keeps billing until deleted.
5. For headless use set TNR_API_TOKEN to a token from the console. The MCP server needs a browser sign-in on first connection.