DigitalOcean Gradient AI
Serverless inference on Gradient AI — Claude, GPT-5, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.5, Llama 4
DigitalOcean Gradient AI is the serverless LLM inference platform from DigitalOcean, offering access to frontier and open-weight models including Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini, GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b, DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash, Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.1, Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, Llama 4 Maverick, and MiMo V2.5 Pro. Pricing is published at docs.digitalocean.com/products/gradient-ai-platform/details/pricing.
DigitalOcean's developer-friendly platform extended to LLM inference — frontier models (Claude, GPT-5) alongside open-weight models (DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, Llama 4) under one billing account.
- Frontier model access: Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, GPT-5 via serverless inference
- Broad catalog: Claude, GPT, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.5, Llama 4 Maverick
- DigitalOcean's developer-friendly platform and billing
- OpenAI-compatible API
- Competitive pricing on open-weight models
- Resells frontier models — no proprietary models
- Pricing may be higher than direct provider APIs for frontier models
- Newer inference platform — less mature than dedicated inference providers
DigitalOcean Gradient AI Models
| Model | Modality | Tier | Price | Cached /1M | TTFT | Throughput | Context | Intel. | Caps | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
gpt-oss-20b gpt-oss | Chat | budget | $0.05/ $0.45 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
gpt-oss-120b gpt-oss | Chat | budget | $0.06/ $0.39 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
deepseek-v4-flash DeepSeek V4 | Chat | efficient | $0.07/ $0.17 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
llama-4-maverick Llama 4 | Chat | advanced | $0.20/ $0.70 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 1.0M | — | ||
mimo-v2-5-pro MiMo-V2.5 | Chat | advanced | $0.40/ $1.50 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 1.0M | — | ||
qwen-3-5-397b-a17b Qwen3.5 | Chat | advanced | $0.55/ $3.50 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
gpt-5-4-mini GPT-5 | Chat | advanced | $0.75/ $4.50 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 1.0M | — | ||
deepseek-v4-pro DeepSeek V4 | Chat | frontier | $0.87/ $1.74 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
kimi-k2-6 Kimi K2 | Chat | advanced | $0.95/ $4.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
claude-haiku-4-5 Claude 4 | Chat | efficient | $1.00/ $5.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 200K | — | ||
gpt-5 GPT-5 | Chat | frontier | $1.25/ $10.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 1.0M | — | ||
glm-5-1 GLM 5 | Chat | advanced | $1.30/ $4.30 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
gpt-4-1 GPT-4.1 | Chat | frontier | $2.00/ $8.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 1.0M | — | ||
gpt-5-4 GPT-5 | Chat | frontier | $2.50/ $15.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 1.0M | — | ||
gpt-4o GPT-4o | Chat | frontier | $2.50/ $10.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 128K | — | ||
claude-sonnet-4-6 Claude 4 | Chat | frontier | $3.00/ $15.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 200K | — | ||
claude-opus-4-7 Claude 4 | Chat | frontier | $5.00/ $25.00 in / out per 1M EST Oct 2026 | — | — | — | 200K | — |
DigitalOcean Gradient AI — Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
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DigitalOcean Gradient AI is an inference API provider that hosts open-weight and third-party large language models. DigitalOcean Gradient AI is the serverless LLM inference platform from DigitalOcean, offering access to frontier and open-weight models including Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini, GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b, DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash, Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.1, Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, Llama 4 Maverick, and MiMo V2.5 Pro. Pricing is published at docs.digitalocean.com/products/gradient-ai-platform/details/pricing. Common use cases include Chat, Coding, Reasoning, Open-source. Headquartered in New York, NY, founded 2012. All models are accessible via a REST API compatible with standard OpenAI-style request formats, enabling drop-in integration with most LLM frameworks and orchestration tools.
DigitalOcean Gradient AI vs other LLM providers
DigitalOcean Gradient AI competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Together AI, Mistral, Cohere, and other inference API providers across dimensions of price, throughput, latency, context window, and model intelligence. DigitalOcean's developer-friendly platform extended to LLM inference — frontier models (Claude, GPT-5) alongside open-weight models (DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, Llama 4) under one billing account. Use the LLM provider comparison tool to see DigitalOcean Gradient AI token pricing, latency, and throughput side-by-side with any other provider. The full LLM pricing table shows all providers ranked by input token cost, output token cost, and throughput in a single sortable view.
Why choose DigitalOcean Gradient AI?
DigitalOcean Gradient AI stands out because: DigitalOcean's developer-friendly platform extended to LLM inference — frontier models (Claude, GPT-5) alongside open-weight models (DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, Llama 4) under one billing account.. The API currently offers 17 models, spanning 7 frontier, 6 advanced, 2 efficient, 2 budget tiers. For teams running high-volume inference workloads, prompt caching and batch API endpoints can reduce effective input token costs by 50–90% — check the context window cost guide for a full breakdown of caching economics.
Understanding DigitalOcean Gradient AI token pricing
DigitalOcean Gradient AI charges separately for input (prompt) and output (completion) tokens, priced per 1M tokens in USD. Output tokens are typically 3–5× more expensive than input tokens due to the compute cost of autoregressive generation. The cheapest {meta.name} input rate is currently $0.05/1M tokens. Prices shown are sourced from DigitalOcean Gradient AI's public pricing page and updated every 15 minutes. Need help estimating your spend? Read the LLM API cost calculator guide — it covers tokens, context windows, prompt caching, and batch discounts with worked examples for RAG, chat history, and document processing workloads.
DigitalOcean Gradient AI context window and model capabilities
Context window size directly affects both capability and cost — every token in the context window is charged as an input token. DigitalOcean Gradient AI's largest context window is 1.0M tokens. For RAG and document processing workloads, longer context windows enable richer retrieval but increase per-call costs proportionally. Prompt caching — where supported — stores the KV state of repeated prefixes and charges 75–90% less for cache hits, making it the most impactful cost optimization for applications with consistent system prompts or retrieved documents. See the LLM context window cost guide for a full analysis of how context length affects your API bill.
Self-hosted vs managed inference: when DigitalOcean Gradient AI makes sense
Managed inference APIs like DigitalOcean Gradient AI eliminate infrastructure overhead — no GPU provisioning, driver management, or model serving stack to maintain. The trade-off is cost at scale: a single H100 at ~$2.50/hr can serve ~500K tokens/min of Llama 3.3 70B, which at DigitalOcean Gradient AI API rates would cost significantly more per token. The break-even point depends on your request volume, latency requirements, and engineering capacity. For teams processing fewer than ~10M tokens/day, managed APIs are almost always cheaper when total cost of ownership is considered. Above that threshold, self-hosted inference on rented GPU compute typically wins on unit economics. Read the cheapest GPU cloud guide for a full break-even analysis. Historical DigitalOcean Gradient AI token price data is available in the LLM price history charts.
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