Baseten vs Lepton AI: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of Baseten and Lepton 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.
Lepton AI
NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton — enterprise serverless inference on DGX infrastructure
Lepton AI was acquired by NVIDIA and rebranded as NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton in 2026. The platform now runs on NVIDIA's DGX Cloud infrastructure, offering serverless inference for popular open-weight models with enterprise-grade reliability. The OpenAI-compatible API and developer experience remain intact, now backed by NVIDIA's global DGX Cloud footprint.
Key metric comparison
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$0.80
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$0.80
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280 tok/s
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260ms
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64/100
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131K
Live token pricing
Strengths and weaknesses
Baseten
Lepton 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.
The only serverless inference platform running directly on NVIDIA DGX Cloud — enterprise reliability with the latest NVIDIA hardware, no infrastructure management required.
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.
Lepton AI FAQs
What happened to Lepton AI?
Lepton AI was acquired by NVIDIA and rebranded as NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton in 2026. The platform now runs on NVIDIA's DGX Cloud infrastructure with the same developer-friendly API.
What models does NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton support?
DGX Cloud Lepton hosts Llama 3.3 70B and other popular open-weight models. The catalog is focused on widely-used production models.
Is DGX Cloud Lepton good for production workloads?
Yes. Backed by NVIDIA's DGX Cloud infrastructure, DGX Cloud Lepton offers enterprise-grade reliability and SLAs suitable for production workloads.
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)
Lepton AI
- Backed by NVIDIA DGX Cloud infrastructure
- Enterprise-grade reliability and SLAs
- Serverless — no infrastructure management
- Smaller model catalog than Together AI or Fireworks
- Pricing may be higher than budget inference providers
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
Lepton AI
- Smaller model catalog than Together AI or Fireworks
- Pricing may be higher than budget inference providers
- No fine-tuning support
Provider category context
Baseten is a inference api, founded in 2019. Lepton 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 Lepton 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.