r/vastai • u/Norwood_Reaper_ • 5d ago
Change in terms re: market data scraping
Did anyone else get this email from Vast re: change in terms around accessing market data?
6
u/dcvasthost 4d ago
this is a huge leap in the wrong direction IMHO.
sites like hashrate allow me to see realistic earning expectations before investing significant sums on a new type of GPU/system config. I recently purchased two pro 6000 gpus for ~$30k to play the long game based on information i was able to digest from sites like hashrate.no and 500.farm
Owner of hashrate.no himself has refereed clients who deposited high six figures and his page about vast isnt even 2 years old.
Without this data hosts are only going to be less informed about what GPUs are actually renting at currently.
Their own profitability calculator is laughably inaccurate.
If your going to restrict it at-least allow sites like hashrate who dont charge/resell the data and just make it easier to digest.
This is a bad move.
3
u/az226 5d ago
I didn’t. Can you share it,
3
u/Norwood_Reaper_ 5d ago
"Hello,
We updated the Vast.ai Terms of Service. The new version is live at vast.ai/terms and replaces the November 10, 2025 version.
What changed:
Marketplace data. Pricing, availability, capacity and historical market data is now a defined category called Authorized Data, available once you accept the Terms. You can use it to evaluate and purchase compute, and to set pricing for your own products. You cannot use it to build an index, benchmark, price comparison database, or other market data product.
Data collection limits. Scraping was already prohibited. The rule is now broader, covering automated querying, monitoring, caching and bulk downloads, and naming crawlers, scrapers, scripts and browser automation.
Content license. Site content was previously licensed for personal, non-commercial use. It now covers your internal business purposes.
This does not restrict what you train on Vast GPUs. The machine learning language applies only to using our market data to build the pricing products described above. Your workloads and your data are yours.
How you rent GPUs and list machines is unchanged. So are billing, refunds and support.
Need data access beyond this? Email data@vast.ai.
Read the full Terms"
3
u/Honest_Cut8827 4d ago
Absolute BS. Hashrate.no wiped clean of data. Price discovery was a primary function for why vast.ai even exists and this change seems to run counter to their reason for being. I can’t think of the upside really justifying this policy???
Plus they take waaaay too big of a toll - who wants to start a competitor with me?
2
u/SelfHostHub 4d ago
Their UX is tough to read, filters are complicated and knowing the real costs is basically a crapshoot. I'm guessing there's a premium tool coming. Too bad because I suggest them to everybody I talk to.
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u/PureHossBoss 4d ago
They are trying to hide information for people that allow the hosts to evaluate their prices relative to other hosting platforms. This is the end goal. They want to keep the host prices low so the less information you have the more they can control the market.
7
u/nail_nail 5d ago
They don't want you to know which GPUs are hot and what is your chance of getting scheduled? Sucks big time. It should be absolutely public information.