Baseten vs Cloudflare Workers AI: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of Baseten and Cloudflare Workers AI — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Rates sourced from public APIs — verify before use.
Baseten
Production ML infrastructure — deploy any model with custom serving, autoscaling, and GPU selection
Baseten is a production ML infrastructure platform for deploying custom and open-weight models with full control over serving configuration, GPU selection, autoscaling, and cold-start behavior. Unlike managed inference APIs, Baseten lets you bring your own model weights, custom preprocessing, and serving logic. It supports Truss (Baseten's open-source model packaging format), vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and custom Python serving code. Ideal for teams that need more control than a managed API but less overhead than raw Kubernetes.
Cloudflare Workers AI
Serverless AI inference at the edge — run LLMs in 300+ Cloudflare data centers globally
Cloudflare Workers AI runs AI inference directly on Cloudflare's global edge network across 300+ data centers, delivering ultra-low latency by processing requests close to end users. It supports a curated catalog of open-weight models including Llama 4, Mistral, Qwen3, Phi-4, and Stable Diffusion, all accessible via the Workers runtime with no cold starts. Pricing is usage-based with a generous free tier (10,000 neurons/day), making it ideal for latency-sensitive applications and edge AI use cases.
Key metric comparison
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Live token pricing
No live pricing data available.
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| Model | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast | $0.29EST Oct 2026 | $2.25 |
| llama-4-scout-17b-16e | $0.27EST Oct 2026 | $0.85 |
| gpt-oss-120b | $0.35EST Oct 2026 | $0.75 |
| gpt-oss-20b | $0.20EST Oct 2026 | $0.30 |
| mistral-small-3.1-24b | $0.35EST Oct 2026 | $0.56 |
Strengths and weaknesses
Baseten
Cloudflare Workers AI
Key differentiators
The production ML platform that gives you managed-API convenience with custom-serving flexibility — deploy any model with your own preprocessing logic, GPU selection, and autoscaling without managing Kubernetes.
An AI inference platform running on a global CDN edge network — 300+ data centers enable low-latency inference for users worldwide without managing any GPU infrastructure.
Frequently asked questions
Baseten FAQs
What is Baseten?
Baseten is a production ML infrastructure platform for deploying AI models with custom serving logic, GPU selection, and autoscaling. It supports any open-weight model or custom fine-tune via the Truss packaging format.
How does Baseten differ from Together AI or Replicate?
Baseten gives you full control over the serving stack — custom preprocessing, postprocessing, GPU selection, and autoscaling behavior. Together AI and Replicate are managed APIs with fixed serving; Baseten is for teams that need custom model serving logic.
What GPUs does Baseten support?
Baseten supports H100 SXM, H100 PCIe, A100 80GB, A10G, and T4 GPUs with per-second billing. You select the GPU type per deployment based on your model's memory and throughput requirements.
Cloudflare Workers AI FAQs
What is Cloudflare Workers AI?
Cloudflare Workers AI is a serverless AI inference platform that runs open-weight models on Cloudflare's global edge network across 300+ data centers. It delivers ultra-low latency by processing AI requests close to end users.
What models does Cloudflare Workers AI support?
Workers AI supports a curated catalog of open-weight models including Llama 4, Mistral 7B, Qwen3, Phi-4, and image generation models like Stable Diffusion. The catalog is smaller than Together AI but covers the most popular open-weight models.
How does Cloudflare Workers AI pricing work?
Workers AI uses a "neurons" pricing model. The free tier includes 10,000 neurons/day. Paid usage is billed per neuron, with cost varying by model size. Check developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/platform/pricing for current rates.
Provider resources
Key strengths compared
Baseten
- Full control over model serving: custom preprocessing, postprocessing, and business logic
- Bring your own weights — deploy any HuggingFace model or custom fine-tune
- GPU selection: H100, A100, A10G, T4 with per-second billing
- More setup required than managed APIs — not a drop-in OpenAI replacement
- Cold starts on scale-to-zero deployments (configurable warm pool available)
Cloudflare Workers AI
- Edge inference across 300+ global data centers — lowest latency for geographically distributed users
- No cold starts — inference runs on persistent GPU capacity at the edge
- Free tier: 10,000 neurons/day (roughly 10M tokens/day on small models)
- Limited model catalog vs. Together AI or OpenRouter — curated selection only
- No support for frontier proprietary models (GPT-6, Claude 5)
Key weaknesses compared
Baseten
- More setup required than managed APIs — not a drop-in OpenAI replacement
- Cold starts on scale-to-zero deployments (configurable warm pool available)
- Pricing is higher than shared inference APIs for low-volume workloads
Cloudflare Workers AI
- Limited model catalog vs. Together AI or OpenRouter — curated selection only
- No support for frontier proprietary models (GPT-6, Claude 5)
- Neurons-based pricing is opaque — hard to predict costs for large workloads
Provider category context
Baseten is a inference api, founded in 2019. Cloudflare Workers AI is a inference api, founded in 2023. Both are inference api providers — the comparison is primarily about pricing, model selection, and feature differentiation within the same tier.
How to choose between them
Both Baseten and Cloudflare Workers AI host open-weight models. The key differentiators are latency, throughput, and which specific model versions each provider offers. Check the speed metrics above — inference API providers often differ significantly on tokens-per-second for the same model. Pricing is typically competitive between them; availability of specific model versions (e.g., Llama 3.1 405B, DeepSeek V3) may be the deciding factor.