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Baseten vs Boundless
Baseten and Boundless both offer OpenAI and Anthropic compatible APIs. Baseten deploys any model you package. Boundless tunes and runs one for you.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Baseten vs Boundless: key differences
Baseten serves about a dozen open models, including GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Kimi K3, and posted the lowest time to first token on the Artificial Analysis board in August 2026 at 0.49 seconds. Dedicated deployments run any Truss-packaged model per GPU minute, with an H100 at about $6.50 an hour, a 99.99% uptime SLA and self-host options. Boundless serves the same three models, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at $0.20 in and $1.00 out per million tokens and Kimi K3 at $2.30 in and $11.40 out, and resells GPT and Claude. Its tailored tier writes uptime, throughput and time-to-first-token targets into the contract and has its engineers tune the stack to hit them.
Baseten is the pick for private fine-tunes, custom speech or embedding models, and labs that want a white-label API. Boundless fits teams that would rather hand over model choice and tuning, judged on their own evals, and its free two-week evaluation compares it with the current provider on real traffic. Boundless publishes no benchmarks, so that trial is the main way to check its latency.
What Baseten and Boundless do
Baseten
Baseten runs two products. Model APIs serve a curated set of about a dozen open models, including GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, Kimi K3 and gpt-oss 120B, over endpoints that speak both the OpenAI Chat Completions shape and the Anthropic Messages shape. That dual compatibility means an existing OpenAI or Claude SDK, or a coding agent, points at Baseten with a base URL change. Dedicated deployments take any model you package with the open-source Truss CLI and bill per GPU minute, with an H100 at about $6.50 an hour.
Example models: GLM 5.3, gpt-oss 120B
Full Baseten profileBoundless
Boundless launched in September 2026 as an inference partner for AI-native startups. It sells two things. The Model API serves pre-tuned models on shared capacity, billed per token from prepaid credits with a budget per API key. Tailored inference reserves capacity for one customer, and Boundless engineers pick the model on the customer’s own evals, tune precision, batching, caching, speculative decoding and parallelism, then run the deployment against uptime, throughput and latency targets written into the contract. A free two-week evaluation tests those targets on real traffic against the customer’s current provider first.
Example models: GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Kimi K3
Full Boundless profileShould you choose Baseten or Boundless?
Baseten vs Boundless at a glance
| Attribute | Baseten | Boundless |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights, about a dozen curated | Open weights, plus closed GPT and Claude |
| Flagship models | GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Kimi K3, gpt-oss 120B | GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Kimi K3 |
| Speed | 0.49s TTFT, lowest measured | 342 tok/s on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Vercel) |
| Price | H100 about $6.50/hr dedicated | $0.04–$2.30 in, $0.21–$11.40 out per 1M (open) |
| Customization | Deploy any model with Truss | Serving-stack tuning, no fine-tuning |
| Deployment | Model APIs, dedicated, self-host | Serverless API, reserved tailored capacity |
| Long context | Varies by model | 1M context on most models |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Baseten and Boundless?
Baseten and Boundless both offer OpenAI and Anthropic compatible APIs. Baseten deploys any model you package. Boundless tunes and runs one for you.
When should I choose Baseten over Boundless?
Lowest measured time to first token; Deploying any model with Truss; White-label APIs for model labs.
When should I choose Boundless over Baseten?
Model choice made on your evals; Contracted time-to-first-token targets; Closed and open models on one API.
Is Baseten or Boundless cheaper?
Baseten: H100 about $6.50/hr dedicated. Boundless: $0.04–$2.30 in, $0.21–$11.40 out per 1M (open). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, Baseten or Boundless?
Baseten: Varies by model. Boundless: 1M context on most models.
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If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious. Our inference stack treats a long-horizon trace as the primary workload, so speed, cost, and accuracy hold up deep into the trace.