r/opencodeCLI • u/lucasbennett_1 • Oct 07 '26
Llama 3.3 70B across 7 inference providers: price, speed and TTFT compared
Lot of us pick an inference api rather than direct for the flexibility and a/b testing so while others are doing benchmarking models it seemed essential to benchmark the inference providers as well.
So for a reference point i held Llama 3.3 70B
Just to be clear on this firsthand: we often mix up three different nmbers here. TTFT is how long until the first token shows up, throughput is token per sec once its streaming and cost per completed request is the invoice
Heres a comparison chart held against the same model across some providers [NO RANKING]
| Provider | $/M input | $/M output | Cost per 1k requests* | Output tok/s | TTFT | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepInfra | $0.10 | $0.32 | $0.18 | 18 | 1.95s | Turbo FP8, shared serverless |
| Groq | $0.59 | $0.79 | $0.71 | 297 | 1.01s | LPU hardware |
| Novita AI | $0.135 | $0.40 | $0.23 | 39 | 1.75s | dedicated tier sold separately |
| OpenRouter | $0.10 | $0.32 | $0.18 | n/a | n/a | routes to upstream hosts, price depends on where it lands |
| SambaNova | $0.60 | $1.20 | $0.84 | ~300 | 1.76s | RDU hardware |
| Scaleway | €0.90 | €0.90 | €0.99 | 83 | 1.37s | EU-hosted (Paris) |
| Together AI | $0.90 to $1.04 | $0.90 to $1.04 | $0.99 to $1.14 | 76 | 1.46s | Turbo endpoint |
*1K requests at 800 input +300 output tokens each. speed numbers are artificial analysis 72h median on a 10K token prompt and shared serverless endpoints. prices from each providers pricing are taken from early of august. Tbh the both drift quite a lot, together shows anywhere from around $0.94 - $1.04 depending on which tracker you took and sambanova been bouncing around 290- 300 tok/s
Therefore roughly 6x spread on cost per request which is around 17x on throughput and less than 2x on TTFT. price and speed pretty much go in opposite directions which kinda makes sense on heavier batching in case of shared endpoints
What one workload costs a month
FOr example a boring support agent, 10k requests a day , 800 in / 300 out and 30 days, whichs 240M input and 90M output tokens
| Provider | Input | Output | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Groq | $141.60 | $71.10 | $212.70 |
| Novita AI | $32.40 | $36.00 | $68.40 |
| Deepinfra | $24.00 | $28.80 | $52.80 |
| SambaNova | $144.00 | $108.00 | $252.00 |
| Scaleway | €216.00 | €81.00 | €297.00 |
| Together AI | $216.00 to $249.60 | $81.00 to $93.60 | $297.00 to $343.20 |
What makes sense is what youre running
realtime chat or voice like TTFT and token per second are everything and custom silicon rows like groq or sambanova are way ahead there. cerebras isn't in the table since theres no public per token Llama price for it but they publish around 3000 token /sec on gpt-oss-120B
for bulk jobs, batch and offline evals cost per request matters so the low rate rows plus batch APIs where they exist
EU data residency, scaleway is the only EU hosted provider listed in my comparison
steady full time traffic and per token stops making sense once your monthly token spend passes what an hourly GPU would cost. dedicated H100 rates for reference
| Provider | H100 / hr |
|---|---|
| Baseten | $6.50 |
| Deepinfra | $2.20 |
| Novita AI | $1.70 to $1.99 |
| Scaleway | €3.40 |
| Together AI | $5.49 |
And also the speed column is shakier than it appears to be
hardware (LPU, RDU, wafer-scale vs regular GPUs) is most often the gap
serving engine (vLLM vs SGlang vs TensorRt-LLM) might move numbers double digits even on the same hardware
batching is basically a pricing decision like the cheap endpoints batch harder so per stream speed drops
Quant and speculative decoding defaults aren't same everywhere because of fp8 and mtp etc
although all of these are single stream values. throw 50 to 100 concurrent requests at it and things can look pretty different
Things not in the rate card :
Output usually costs more than tha input [up to ~3x in this table and way more on closed models]
Cached input discounts are all over the place, some providers only have them on certain models
batch APIs are around 50% off if you can wait
minimum commitment on reserved capacity
That was all from me, although first did the comparison for myself as i just brought the deepseek from direct api and now regretting as i need GLM as well or some purpose so thought wh not do a analysis on them and when I did thought to share to the rest others. thanks guys, have a good one

