Run Whisper large-v3 on a VPS.
Prices checked
The cheapest VPS that runs Whisper large-v3 is Leaseweb VPS 1 at $5.02 a month, with 6 GB of RAM for the 4.6 GB it needs, checked .
Best plans for Whisper large-v3
Cheapest first, among plans that fit.
- 1
VPS 1 · 4 vCPU / 6 GB · Europe
Leaseweb · 4C · 6 GB · 100 GB NVMe$5.02/mo - 2
VPS 1 · 4 vCPU / 6 GB · UK
Leaseweb · 4C · 6 GB · 100 GB NVMe$6.02/mo - 3
VPS 1 · 4 vCPU / 6 GB · US
Leaseweb · 4C · 6 GB · 100 GB NVMe$6.29/mo - 4
VPS 1 · 4 vCPU / 6 GB · Singapore
Leaseweb · 4C · 6 GB · 100 GB NVMe$7.21/mo - 5
VPS 2 · 6 vCPU / 16 GB · Europe
Leaseweb · 6C · 16 GB · 200 GB NVMe$9.04/mo - 6$9.49/mo
Hetzner · 4C · 8 GB · 80 GB NVMeWhat it needs
RAM needed
4.6 GB
CPU inference at native format
Weights
3.1 GB
native format
OS and runtime
1.5 GB
headroom
Speech-to-text via whisper.cpp; ~3 GB in F16, CPU-friendly for batch transcription.
- Size
- 1.54B parameters
- Kind
- speech
- Released
- 2023-11
- License
- Apache-2.0
Facts from Hugging Face: sizes from bits per weight, 3,507,234 downloads.
Or rent a GPU
every GPU price1 provider rents the RTX A5000, with 24 GB of GPU memory against the 4.6 GB Whisper large-v3 needs.
Cheapest board that fits
RTX A5000
24 GB of GPU memory
On demand
$0.16per GPU an hour
RunPod
Held for a month
$116.80
730 hours of RTX A5000 · Community Cloud
How we count
On a CPU-only VPS Whisper large-v3 needs about 4.6 GB of RAM: 3.1 GB of weights in the model's native format and 1.5 GB for the OS and runtime. 260 of the 527 plans in the index fit and include a disk. A plan runs it comfortably with 20% headroom over the total, and is a tight fit with exactly enough.
A GPU rate is per GPU for an hour, and the monthly figure is 730 hours of the whole instance at it, tax excluded.
Frequently asked
- How much RAM does Whisper large-v3 need?
- About 4.6 GB for CPU inference at Q4_K_M: 3.1 GB of weights, 0 MB of KV cache at 8,192 tokens of context, and 1.5 GB of headroom. Longer contexts need more KV cache (0 KB per token for this model).
- What is the cheapest VPS that can run Whisper large-v3?
- Leaseweb VPS 1 · 4 vCPU / 6 GB · Europe (6 GB RAM, 4 vCPU) at $5.02/mo excl. VAT runs it comfortably as of 31 Oct 2026.
- How fast will Whisper large-v3 run on a VPS without a GPU?
- Speech models are small and run well on CPUs. Throughput scales with vCPUs rather than RAM.
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