Baseten vs Nebius AI 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.

Nebius AI Cloud

One API definition generates the REST and gRPC interfaces, the CLI, Terraform provider and three SDKs, with a 602-operation OpenAPI document, X-Idempotency-Key and role-scoped service accounts. The status page lists 14 major incidents between 14 July and 8 October 2026, no request rate limits were found, and signup needs a browser and a card.

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

Nebius AI Cloud

1. Use a service account with an authorised key, then exchange a five-minute RS256 JWT at https://auth.eu.nebius.com/oauth2/token/exchange for a 12-hour Bearer token
2. Send X-Idempotency-Key with a random UUID on every create, update and delete, since a 504 can follow a call that succeeded
3. Poll the returned operation (/ai/v1/endpoints/operations/{id}) until status is set; concurrent operations on one resource are not supported
4. Stop or delete endpoints when idle. A stopped endpoint bills nothing, a stopped Devlab or VM still bills for its disk
5. Check region support first. Serverless AI is absent from eu-south1 and us-north1, and each GPU platform exists in one to four regions
6. Run the beta nebius/mcp-server with safe mode on (the default); nebius_cli_execute can run any CLI command when SAFE_MODE=false