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Wafer vs Infron
Wafer tunes serving stacks to run open models faster. Infron routes across 400+ models from many providers.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Wafer vs Infron: key differences
Wafer's agents tune batching, decoding, quantization and kernels, reporting Qwen 3.5 397B 2.8x faster than stock SGLang, and sell Wafer Pass from $10 a week. Infron is a gateway: one OpenAI-compatible API in front of 400+ models from 100+ providers, at provider rates plus a 3% to 5% fee on credit top-ups, with fallbacks, region pinning and a 99.9% uptime SLA on dedicated throughput.
Wafer sells speed on a small catalog at a flat rate; Infron sells reach across vendors at metered rates. Individual developers in coding agents may like Wafer Pass; products that need many models and uptime fit Infron.
What Wafer and Infron do
Wafer
Wafer builds AI agents that act as GPU performance engineers, then sells inference on the stacks those agents tune. The company came out of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch as a "Cursor for CUDA" that turned slow PyTorch into custom kernels. Founders Emilio Andere and Steven Arellano are based in San Francisco. Its agents profile a workload, generate candidate configs across batching, decoding, quantization, engines, kernels and hardware, measure each one and deploy the winner.
Example models: Qwen 3.5 397B Turbo, GLM 5.1 Turbo
Full Wafer profile
Infron
Infron is a US-based AI gateway and inference platform. One OpenAI-compatible API reaches 400+ models from 100+ providers, including DeepSeek, Qwen, Claude, Gemini and GPT through what Infron calls official partner routes, plus media and search models. Teams set provider preferences and fallbacks, see usage and billing in one place, and can bring their own provider keys at no fee. Lawrence Xu is CEO and co-founder Andrew Zheng is CTO.
Example models: DeepSeek, Qwen, Claude, Gemini, GPT
Full Infron profileShould you choose Wafer or Infron?
Wafer vs Infron at a glance
| Attribute | Wafer |  Infron |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Closed and open, 400+ models |
| Flagship models | Qwen 3.5 397B Turbo, GLM 5.1 Turbo | DeepSeek, Qwen, Claude, Gemini, GPT |
| Speed | 2–2.8x vs stock vLLM or SGLang | Unknown |
| Price | Wafer Pass from $10 a week | Provider rates; 3–5% top-up fee |
| Customization | Agent-tuned dedicated deployments | Custom deployments |
| Deployment | Serverless pass, dedicated | Gateway API, dedicated, BYOK |
| Long context | Varies by model | Varies by model |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Wafer and Infron?
Wafer tunes serving stacks to run open models faster. Infron routes across 400+ models from many providers.
When should I choose Wafer over Infron?
Flat-rate open models in coding agents; Tuned dedicated endpoints; NVIDIA and AMD support.
When should I choose Infron over Wafer?
Closed and open models on one key and one bill; Automatic failover across providers; Region pinning across Asia, Europe and the US.
Is Wafer or Infron cheaper?
Wafer: Wafer Pass from $10 a week. Infron: Provider rates; 3–5% top-up fee. The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, Wafer or Infron?
Wafer: Varies by model. Infron: Varies by model.
Related comparisons
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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.