Baseten vs Scaleway: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of Baseten and Scaleway — 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.
Scaleway
B300-SXM GPU instances — French sovereign cloud, Generative APIs with 1M free tokens
Scaleway is a French cloud provider offering GPU compute and LLM inference with the strongest EU data sovereignty credentials. The Generative APIs catalog includes GLM-5.2 (€1.80/€5.50), Mistral Medium 3.5 (€1.50/€7.50), Qwen3.8-27B (€0.60/€3.30), DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (€0.40/€0.80), gpt-oss-120B (€0.15/€0.60), and Llama 3.3 70B (€0.90/€0.90). All new customers get 1M free tokens. GPU instances include B300-SXM, H100, L40S, and L4.
Key metric comparison
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$0.60
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$0.60
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170 tok/s
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400ms
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64/100
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131K
Live token pricing
Strengths and weaknesses
Baseten
Scaleway
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 strongest European data sovereignty credentials — French company, French data centres, 1M free tokens for new customers, B300-SXM GPU instances, and <200ms TTFT for European users.
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.
Scaleway FAQs
What models does Scaleway Generative APIs offer?
Scaleway's Generative APIs catalog includes GLM-5.2 (€1.80/€5.50), Mistral Medium 3.5 (€1.50/€7.50), Qwen3.8-27B (€0.60/€3.30), DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (€0.40/€0.80), gpt-oss-120B (€0.15/€0.60), Llama 3.3 70B (€0.90/€0.90), and more. All prices per 1M tokens.
Does Scaleway offer free tokens?
Yes. Every new Scaleway customer gets 1,000,000 free tokens to use across any Generative APIs model. Billing starts from the 1,000,001st token.
What GPU hardware does Scaleway offer in 2026?
Scaleway offers B300-SXM GPU instances (latest NVIDIA Blackwell), H100 SXM and PCIe, L40S, and L4 GPU instances. B300-SXM is one of the first Blackwell deployments available in Europe.
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)
Scaleway
- 1M free tokens for all new customers — best free tier in Europe
- B300-SXM GPU instances — latest NVIDIA Blackwell hardware in Europe
- Live model catalog: GLM-5.2, Mistral Medium 3.5, Qwen3.8-27B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, gpt-oss-120B
- Smaller model catalog than US-based inference providers
- Lower throughput than speed-optimised 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
Scaleway
- Smaller model catalog than US-based inference providers
- Lower throughput than speed-optimised providers
- Less developer tooling than OpenAI or Anthropic
Provider category context
Baseten is a inference api, founded in 2019. Scaleway is a cloud, founded in 1999. The category difference means these providers serve partially overlapping use cases — compare the model lists and pricing tables above to find the best fit for your specific workload.
How to choose between them
Choose Baseten if you need full control over model serving: custom preprocessing, postprocessing, and business logic. Choose Scaleway if you need 1m free tokens for all new customers — best free tier in europe. For high-volume production workloads, run a cost comparison using the token pricing table above with your actual prompt/completion token ratio — the cheapest provider depends heavily on your input-to-output token ratio.