Baseten vs Runpod

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.

Runpod

Per-second billing across more than a dozen serverless GPU classes, H100 at $4.79 and A100 80 GB at $2.72 an hour. Data-centre outages of 6 to 24 hours in each of July, August and September 2026.

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

Runpod

1. Create a Restricted or Read Only key per endpoint for the agent, not an All key
2. Use REST v2 at api.runpod.io/v2 with a Bearer header; avoid GraphQL, which puts the key in the URL
3. Fetch /run results within 30 minutes and /runsync results within 1 minute, or they're gone
4. Call /retry on a failed job ID rather than submitting a duplicate job
5. Check /health before relying on an endpoint idle for a week, since max workers drop to 0