A frame is like 20-30 seconds for one pass on my 3090, you may have multiple tools and multiple passes.. say 60 seconds a frame x 300 frames about 5 hours -- 3090 costs 0.44$ per hour on runpod.. a little more than 2$

Kinda crazy how averse to ongoing costs i am. I have a 3080TI for Blender rendering and sculpting and general blender, so i definitely need something good local.. but i'm debating buying top of the line on the next iteration so i can do this stuff locally. Thousands of dollars perhaps just to avoid a $2 cost lol.

The 2$ adds up + thats an ephemeral environment and these things are super finiky to get working properly (dependency and initial setup + adding tools to your workflow). Plus there is a more of a craft like - ad-hoc approach to how you want to do things, plus a learning curve, with what tools and scripts you want to do or write simple stuff on your own -- runpod sounds good on paper but after a while, you then want AWS/Google VM so things are stable and your environment is sane and stable. Then if you calculate, you'll come up to a cost of buying a nice card in 6-10 monthly payments.. So if you want to play with it in peace you spend once and only worry about electricity costs :D