> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cloud.vessl.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Compare inference service types

> How Provisioned Throughput differs from the serverless and dedicated endpoints offered across the industry.

Inference providers generally offer three kinds of service. **Provisioned Throughput** sits between the other two: you reserve guaranteed capacity for a stock model, without renting and operating hardware yourself.

## Comparison

|                      | Provisioned Throughput                                                             | Serverless                                | Dedicated endpoints                                                                         |
| -------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **What you reserve** | Committed capacity for a chosen model or model family                              | Nothing; shared resources                 | GPUs reserved for you alone                                                                 |
| **Billing unit**     | Per Provisioned Throughput Unit (PTU), over the contract term you agree with sales | Per token, per second, or per output unit | Per minute of reserved hardware                                                             |
| **SLA**              | Throughput, reliability, and latency targets set in your contract                  | Best effort, with dynamic rate limits     | No shared-fleet rate limits; performance depends on the hardware configuration and settings |
| **Best for**         | Production workloads on stock models                                               | Prototyping, highly variable traffic      | Fine-tuned models, custom hardware, fine-grained latency and throughput control             |
| **How to get it**    | Contact sales                                                                      | Self-serve                                | Self-serve                                                                                  |

<Note>
  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.
</Note>

## 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.

For a stock model at production scale, see [Request Provisioned Throughput](/inference/request).