Comparison
Provisioned Throughput is the inference service VESSL Cloud offers today, and Serverless Endpoint is on the way. The serverless and dedicated endpoint columns describe service types you’ll find across inference providers, so you can see where Provisioned Throughput fits.
When to choose Provisioned Throughput
- Your traffic is large and predictable, and you need a throughput floor you can plan against rather than a rate limit that moves with everyone else’s traffic.
- You run a stock open-weight model as-is and don’t need custom hardware or a fine-tuned checkpoint.
- You want an SLA on throughput, reliability, and latency without operating GPUs, serving engines, or autoscaling yourself.
- You want a lower, predictable cost per token than a frontier closed-model API for the same volume.
When another type fits better
- Serverless — you’re prototyping, or your traffic is too spiky and low-volume to justify a commitment. Pay per token and accept best-effort performance.
- Dedicated endpoints — you serve your own fine-tuned model, need a specific hardware configuration, or need to tune the serving stack yourself. Rent the hardware and take on the operations.