# Baseten vs Massed Compute

> Baseten scores 66.5 (B) to Massed Compute's 42.3 (E) for gpu compute. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-massed-compute
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-massed-compute.md (~2,700 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-massed-compute.min.md (~730 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-massed-compute.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-09

Baseten scores 66.5 (B) on agent readiness against Massed Compute's 42.3 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do gpu compute.

- Baseten: grade B, 66.5/100, rank #285 of 950. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/baseten.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/baseten.json
- Massed Compute: grade E, 42.3/100, rank #896 of 950. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/massed-compute.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/massed-compute.json
- Best GPU and serverless compute for AI workloads: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/gpu-compute/index.md
- All 167 gpu compute comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/gpu-compute/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Baseten (B)

Good for: Teams that want one model behind a production endpoint with real autoscaling knobs, environments and scoped keys.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 80 against 20
- Schema & documentation, 84 against 69
- Security & auth, 82 against 61
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
- Maintenance & community, 90 against 51

Also in its favour:
- Open source

Watch for: H100 at $6.50 and A100 at $4.00 an hour, and start-up and idle replica time are billed

### Massed Compute (E)

Good for: Agents that rent whole GPU VMs by the hour for training, fine-tuning or a model server and want a small MCP tool set with a read-only mode.

Watch for: No status page, incident history or security.txt was found on any of the vendor's hosts


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Baseten | Massed Compute | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 80 | 20 | Baseten +60 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 84 | 69 | Baseten +15 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 55 | 56 | Massed Compute +1 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 82 | 61 | Baseten +21 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 20 | Baseten +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 90 | 51 | Baseten +39 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 65 | 61 | Baseten +4 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -5 | -5 | |
| **Total** | | **66.5 · B** | **42.3 · E** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Baseten | Massed Compute |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Baseten | Massed Compute |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.baseten.co` | `https://vm.massedcompute.com/api/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Pay per use |
| Price for gpu compute | not published | $5.43 per GPU-hour |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary service under Massed Compute's Terms & Conditions and End User Licence Agreement. The `massed-compute-mcp` wrapper on GitHub is MIT |
| Tools exposed | none | 17 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.Massed-Compute/mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-07-24 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | couldn't be read |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-07-22 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | couldn't be read |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Popularity | 1.2k stars, 74k PyPI/wk | 1 stars |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | none |

## Verdicts

**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.

**Massed Compute.** The hosted MCP server and REST API accept OAuth grants or API tokens in read-only and full-access tiers, and all 17 tools carry typed schemas and safety annotations in a public server card. No status page, rate limit figures or API changelog were found, a launch has no idempotency key, and the governing terms could not be read.

## Before you call either

### 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

### Massed Compute

1. Use `https://vm.massedcompute.com/api/v1`. The older docs at api-docs.massedcompute.com describe a separate marketplace API on `api.massedcompute.com` whose keys come from support.
2. Ask the owner for a read-only token unless the task must launch or terminate. Read-only credentials cannot call launch, restart, terminate or SSH key changes.
3. Call `gpu_inventory_list` and `images_list` before `instances_launch`. Product names and image IDs are free values, and SXM-only images do not run on PCIe cards.
4. Expect 402 on launch until the owner has added credit and set a recharge amount and threshold. List instances before retrying a launch.
5. Terminate to end billing. Stopping keeps the full hourly charge, and termination deletes the instance data.

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Baseten or Massed Compute?

Baseten scores 66.5 (B) on agent readiness against Massed Compute's 42.3 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

### Do Baseten and Massed Compute need an API key?

Baseten needs an API key. Massed Compute takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call Baseten and Massed Compute without installing anything?

Yes. Baseten has a hosted endpoint at https://api.baseten.co and Massed Compute at https://vm.massedcompute.com/api/v1.

### Are Baseten and Massed Compute open source?

Baseten is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for Massed Compute.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-massed-compute.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-massed-compute.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "baseten", "b": "massed-compute"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare baseten massed-compute`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/baseten.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/massed-compute.json

## Other comparisons with Baseten or Massed Compute

- [Baseten vs Beam](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-beam.md)
- [Baseten vs Cerebrium](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-cerebrium.md)
- [Baseten vs CoreWeave](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-coreweave.md)
- [Baseten vs Crusoe Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-crusoe-cloud.md)
- [Baseten vs Hugging Face Inference Endpoints](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-hugging-face-inference-endpoints.md)
- [Baseten vs Hyperbolic](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-hyperbolic.md)
- [Baseten vs Koyeb](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-koyeb.md)
- [Baseten vs Lambda Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-lambda.md)
- [Baseten vs Modal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-modal.md)
- [Baseten vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Baseten vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-northflank.md)
- [Baseten vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Baseten vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-runpod.md)
- [Baseten vs Thunder Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-thunder-compute.md)
- [Baseten vs Vast.ai](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-vast-ai.md)
- [Baseten vs Verda](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-verda.md)
- [Beam vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Cerebrium vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cerebrium-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [CoreWeave vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/coreweave-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Crusoe Cloud vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crusoe-cloud-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Hugging Face Inference Endpoints vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hugging-face-inference-endpoints-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Hyperbolic vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hyperbolic-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Koyeb vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/koyeb-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Lambda Cloud vs Massed Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lambda-vs-massed-compute.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Modal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-modal.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-northflank.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-runpod.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Thunder Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-thunder-compute.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Vast.ai](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-vast-ai.md)
- [Massed Compute vs Verda](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/massed-compute-vs-verda.md)