What is the cheapest render farm?

Anyone wants a render farm with reasonable prices and frequent discounts. What is the cheapest render farm for artists? Find out with Radarrender.

What is the cheapest render farm?

An online render farm is a rendering service accessible over the internet, which can be used to render your projects. The render farm accelerates the rendering process by distributing the computing task over a large number of render nodes (CPU and GPU nodes). As a result, a project can be completed a lot faster. The rendering time of large renders can be reduced from weeks to a few hours.

There are various factors to consider when selecting an online render farm. One of them is the render farm’s price and affordability. Each project will usually have a certain budget. So you have to find a render farm that can render your project within that amount of money.

For those with a small budget, render farms can be expensive. Therefore, they want to find the cheapest render farm possible.

Then, what is the cheapest render farm?

The answer to this question is very dependent on what 3D software, render engines, and plugins you need the render farm to support. Render farms range in price from free to very expensive. And each of them best tackles different use cases.

Let’s discover both free and paid render farms below.

Free render farms

Very few render farms claim to be free. For example, the SheepIt render farm. It is a distributed render farm as the service does not own any render machines. Instead, it instead on people to share their computers. In other words, you need to offer your computer for rendering by others when you do not need it. In return, you get the credits to render your projects next time.

So, you pay your computer power for using the SheepIt render farm. And there is an electricity bill.

Is there really a free render farm? Well, it depends on what you define to be “free”. 

Generally, there is no truly free render farm. Because you will have to pay in one way or another.

But if you are not that strict about it. As long as you do not pay money (spare computer power and electricity bill), render farms such as SheepIt is free for users.

However, free render farms only support one certain 3D software and a few render engines, often free software because all the members must have it installed and running. That is why free render farms are almost exclusively for Blender rendering.

Commercial render farms

Since free render farms have certain downsides, mostly about software support, most artists still find a commercial render farm. How to render on a commercial render farm with a budget. You need to understand how its pricing works and how much does it cost.

How does render farm pricing work?

Many render farms measure their rendering power in Ghz hour (CPU rendering) or OctaneBench hour (GPU rendering).

You can simply imagine this. If a one-core CPU running at 1 Ghz renders for 1 hour, its rendering power equals 1 Ghz hour at the render farm.

On the other hand, if a GPU with a 100 OctaneBench score renders for 1 hour, its rendering power equals 100 OctaneBench per hour at the render farm. (OctaneBench is a GPU benchmarking utility created by Otoy).

Besides, the render farm may use other pricing units such as core hour and node hour (machine hour, server hour).

• Core hour refers to the price of 1 core used in an hour of rendering, which is quite similar to Ghz hour.
• Node hour refers to the price of 1 node used in an hour of rendering (some render farms may call machine or server instead of node).

So that is the brief explanation of how pricing of render farm works. If you want to understand more clearly, please check out our article “How the render farm pricing works?”.

See more: How The Render Farm Pricing Works?

Cost Calculator

To provide users with an approximate cost of their projects, many commercials render farms offer a Cost Calculator tool. It will compare the render farm with your local computer and your rendering times, then give an estimation of how much the project costs. So you can get a fast overview of your rendering costs and see if your budget fits.

However, it is a rough estimation. The render farm typically recommends you upload a few frames to verify the render time and cost.

In addition, some render farms offer other methods for users to get a more precise estimation. Such as AnimaRender’s DemoRender – a free render test to make sure the result. Especially, BlenderGrid calculates the exact price after you upload the project.

Price of the cheapest render farm

It is not easy and precise to compare the prices among render farms. Because each render farm may use a different pricing unit. Even if two render farms use the same pricing unit, it is unsure that they define it the same way. Moreover, different models and generations of CPUs or GPUs produce different computing power.

The precise way is always to render on the render farm. You can make use of free trials of render farms to test them out.

In this article, we will list the prices of render farms we know. So you can at least get an overview of render farm prices. We only list the lowest price if the render farms offer various options.

Lastly, a commercial render farm can be cheaper than you think if you know how to take advantage of its programs. You can find several ways to save money when using an online render farm in this article: How to cut costs when using a render farm?

See more: Our Best Render Farms For Cinema 4D 2023