What is open and free
Pulse is an open compute-pricing reference. The commitment is concrete: every input that goes into the published indices is itself published. This page is precise about what that means.
What's open
- Methodology documents — the formal definition behind every published index, versioned and permanent. Browse all methodology versions.
- Published index values — current and historical, with full provenance. CSV and JSON downloads; programmatic API.
- Per-provider price assessments — the per-provider, per-day prices that feed the median. Every contributing observation, every assessment date, with normalisation notes and source provenance.
- Raw collection logs — every API call Pulse makes to every provider, with HTTP status, response time, error message, and run id. The audit trail is the dataset.
- Marketplace utilisation — Vast.ai available count, rented count, and utilisation percentage per GPU model.
- Provider stock state — Lambda, RunPod, DataCrunch, Hyperstack stock observations per region, normalised to a common vocabulary (
available,low,constrained,out_of_stock). - Capacity forecasts — Hyperstack's forward-looking 7-day and 30-day projections per GPU per region.
- Calculation code — public on GitHub, permissive license. Tagged releases match methodology versions.
- Reproducibility notebook — runs end-to-end against the public data in under ten minutes. Try it.
The complete underlying dataset is one URL: /data_export.json (refreshed daily). Per-series exports at /data/ are convenience slices of the same data.
Why expose everything, not just the indices
A reference index is only worth citing if its inputs are inspectable. Closed indices ask you to take the median on faith; Pulse exposes every contributing observation so the median can be verified, recomputed, and challenged. The open commitment is structural: the inputs are the trust signal, and the indices are the convenience layer on top.
What's still held back
- Operational scrapers and ingestion code — partial release, possibly delayed. Holds back operational edge without breaking reproducibility (sample data plus calculation code is enough to reproduce any value).
- Internal monitoring and runbooks — operational hygiene, not part of the public reference.
Provider terms and takedowns
Pulse honours provider terms of service and responds promptly to good-faith takedown or scope-change requests at [email protected]. Where a provider's terms preclude bulk redistribution and the provider asks Pulse to stop, the affected data moves from "redistributed" to "linked to source" — the methodology and the published indices are unaffected, because Pulse owns the index calculation; only the underlying redistribution changes.
As of v1.0 publication, no provider has objected. The corrections page will log any future scope changes with date, provider, and what changed.
Future optionality
A premium API tier (low latency, higher rate limits, custom export formats) is preserved as future optionality but is not built today. The free open tier is the commitment; any convenience layer that may appear later sits alongside it, not over it.
License summary
- Apache 2.0 for Pulse-owned code.
- CC-BY 4.0 for Pulse-owned outputs (index values, distribution stats, derived datasets, sample data, schema).
- Provider-origin observations are redistributed by Pulse on a good-faith basis under the same CC-BY 4.0 terms; if any rights conflict surfaces, the takedown policy above applies. Always cite the underlying provider when redistributing.