Baseten vs Fireworks AI

The short answer

Pick Baseten if

Teams that want per-token APIs and dedicated GPUs from one vendor with no plan fee — minute-granularity billing means a model that runs for ten minutes costs ten minutes.

Pick Fireworks AI if

Running open-weight models without operating GPUs — the same DeepSeek and Qwen checkpoints the labs publish, served per token, with a path to dedicated hardware if throughput demands it.

8 sourced criteria separate them:

Pricing model

Baseten: No platform fee: per-token Model APIs for open models, and dedicated deployments billed per minute of compute with volume discounts. The Pro tier buys priority access to high-demand GPUs rather than a lower rate.

Fireworks AI: Three products on one bill. Serverless inference is per token, per model. Fine-tuning is per million TRAINING tokens by parameter band — $0.50 for models up to 16B, $10.00 above 300B. Dedicated GPUs are hourly: $7.00 for an H100 or H200, $10.00 for a B200.

Input price, top model

Baseten: $1.40 per million input tokens for GLM-5.3, with cached input at $0.14 and output at $4.40. GLM-5.2 Fast, a speed variant, is $2.10.

Fireworks AI: $3.00 per million input tokens for Kimi K3, the most expensive model in its serverless catalogue. Fireworks hosts other labs' open-weight models rather than its own, so "flagship" here means the top of what it serves.

Output price, top model

Baseten: $4.40 per million output tokens for GLM-5.3.

Fireworks AI: $15.00 per million output tokens for Kimi K3.

Input price, cheapest model

Baseten: $0.10 per million input tokens for GPT OSS 120B, with output at $0.50. GLM-5.3-Flash is $0.15 in and $0.50 out.

Fireworks AI: $0.15 per million input tokens for GLM 5.3 Flash, with output at $0.50. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is $0.22 in and $0.66 out — the same model DeepSeek itself sells at $0.44 peak.

Context window

Baseten: 1,048K tokens on the DeepSeek V4 line and the GLM 5.2/5.3 family, the widest it serves; 262K on the Kimi K2 models, 200K on GLM 4.7 and 128K on GPT OSS 120B. Baseten's table publishes these in thousands, so the magnitude is 1,048,000 rather than the 1,048,576 a power-of-two reading would give — the vendor's own figure, not a conversion of it.

Fireworks AI: 1,048,576 tokens on Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 and both DeepSeek V4 variants; 262,144 on Qwen3.8 and 131,072 on Muse Glimmer 30B. The window is the model's, not Fireworks'.

Max output tokens

Baseten: 262K tokens on most models, and it is a separate ceiling from the context window rather than the remainder of it: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 allows 384K output inside a 1,048K window, while GLM 4.7, Nemotron Ultra and GPT OSS 120B cap output at their full context. The Inkling models are the outlier at 32K.

Fireworks AI: No separate output cap. max_tokens is bounded by the model's context length — prompt plus completion must fit inside it — and what happens on overflow is set by context_length_exceeded_behavior rather than a fixed ceiling.

H100 SXM, per GPU-hour

Baseten: $6.50 per hour for a dedicated H100 80GB. Baseten publishes $0.10833 per MINUTE — the hourly figure is that times 60, ours rather than Baseten's, and the page offers an hourly toggle. A100 80GB is $0.06667 a minute and B200 $0.16633.

Fireworks AI: $7.00 per hour for an H100 80GB on demand, or $8.00 on the shorter commitment shown beside it. The same rate applies to an H200 141GB.

Largest GPU offered

Baseten: 180GB per GPU on a B200, at $0.16633 per minute — $9.98 an hour.

Fireworks AI: 180GB per GPU on a B200, at $10.00 an hour on demand.

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