How rentals work

The rental lifecycle

1. Compare and quote. The catalog shows only offers that are ready, recently observed and qualification-cleared. A quote is immutable, expires after 60 seconds and must be re-accepted if the price changes.
2. Fund and reserve. Reserving atomically holds your bounded budget and the machine. Two sessions competing for one offer produce one allocation and an explicit conflict — the losing session's credit is never spent.
3. Verified start. The meter starts at verified readiness — an external probe bound to your leased endpoint — not when the container merely exists.
4. Run. Connect with copyable SSH local forwarding and verify the host-key fingerprint shown on the rental page. Extend the funded budget without changing the agreed rate.
5. Stop and retrieve. Stop-requested and stop-confirmed are different states. After a confirmed stop, results stay readable for 30 minutes over read-only SFTP; the GPU is off and the machine stays allocated to you until cleanup.
6. Settle. The final bill follows accepted meter evidence and the durable journal. Erased data is not recoverable after cleanup.

Connection model

Default access is an SSH local forward to the supported Jupyter endpoint. There is no browser terminal. Secrets, signed URLs and private keys never appear in logs.

ssh -L 8888:127.0.0.1:8888 -p <port> tenant@<edge-host>
# verify the host-key fingerprint shown on your rental page first

Trust vocabulary

Detected hardware, available runtime, qualification outcome and rentability are separate facts and are shown separately. “Verified” always pairs a color cue with the word. Unknown or missing evidence stays unavailable.

Money

Balances are spendable, held, pending, disputed and withdrawable — shown separately. Deposits are USDC on Base (chain 8453). USD reference prices settle 1:1 in USDC units under disclosed pricing terms; USDC depeg risk is disclosed on the fees page.