Baseten vs Lambda Cloud

Baseten

Team API keys scoped to inference-only, metrics-only or a single environment or model, plus a Viewer role since 1 September 2026. H100 at $6.50 and A100 at $4.00 an hour, and start-up and idle replica time are billed.

Lambda Cloud

H100 SXM at $3.99 and B200 at $6.69 an hour with per-minute billing. No scale to zero, autoscaling or endpoints; an idle VM bills until terminated.

Baseten

1. Create a team key with inference-only permission for calling models and keep full-access keys out of the agent
2. Sleep for retry_after seconds on a 429 from api.baseten.co; the activate and deactivate endpoints allow 20 calls a minute
3. Retry 429, 503 and 529 with backoff, but treat 500 as a bug in your model code
4. Set scale_down_delay below the 900-second default or every burst bills 15 idle minutes
5. Send payloads over 256 KiB to /predict, not /async_predict, unless support has raised the async limit

Lambda Cloud

1. Call GET /instance-types first and read regions_with_capacity_available before trying to launch
2. Space launch calls 12 seconds apart; a sixth in a minute returns 429 with global/rate-limited
3. Branch on the error code, not the message or suggestion, which Lambda says may change
4. List instances before retrying a failed launch, since there's no idempotency key and a retry can start a second machine
5. Terminate the instance in a finally block; billing runs by the minute until you do