Run Whisper large-v3 on a VPS.
prices as of · Contabo as of · 254 of 524 plans fit, disk included · re-ranked daily
Speech-to-text via whisper.cpp; ~3 GB in F16, CPU-friendly for batch transcription. On a CPU-only VPS it 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. 254 of the 524 plans in our index fit and include a disk; the cheapest comfortable pick is HOSTKEY's vm.mini · 4 vCPU · 6 GB at $5.93/mo.
The cheapest VPS that runs Whisper large-v3 is HOSTKEY vm.mini at $5.93/mo, 6 GB of RAM against the 4.6 GB the model needs, checked 16 Sept 2026.
Best VPS plans for Whisper large-v3
ranked by price among plans that fit
- 1runs comfortably$5.93/moView at HOSTKEY ↗
- 2runs comfortably$6.35/mochecked 10 days agoView at Contabo ↗
- 3runs comfortably$7.58/moView at HOSTKEY ↗
- 4runs comfortably$8.65/mochecked 10 days agoView at Contabo ↗
- 5runs comfortably$9.80/monot available nowView at Hetzner ↗
- 6runs comfortably$9.80/moView at OVHcloud ↗
RAM needed · CPU inference
4.6 GB
- weights · native format
- 3.1 GB
- OS + runtime headroom
- 1.5 GB
Model card
- Size
- 1.54B parameters
- Context
- n/a tokens
- Kind
- speech
- Released
- 2023-11
- License
- Apache-2.0
Facts fetched from Hugging Face on 7 Sept 2026: sizes from bits-per-weight · 5,029,688 downloads.
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?
- HOSTKEY vm.mini · 4 vCPU · 6 GB (6 GB RAM, 4 vCPU) at $5.93/mo excl. VAT runs it comfortably as of 16 Sept 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.