Beam vs Northflank

Beam

Per-millisecond billing with cold starts and image pulls free, H100 PCIe at $3.50 and RTX 4090 at $0.69 an hour. No published request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA.

Northflank

OpenAPI 3.0 with over 100 paths, enums and per_page, page and cursor on every list. No scale to zero for services; minimum instances must be at least 1.

Beam

1. Check the response body for ok: false on gateway calls; a failure can arrive as HTTP 200
2. Don't pipe beam deploy --format json output into CI logs, since it contains the workspace token
3. Route anything over 180 seconds to a task queue and poll the task instead of holding the endpoint request
4. Set keep_warm_seconds deliberately; the 180-second endpoint default bills three minutes of GPU after every call
5. Pass gpu=["RTX4090", "A10G"] so a job still schedules when one type is out

Northflank

1. Issue the agent a team token under an API role limited to one project, not a personal token
2. Read x-ratelimit-remaining and wait x-ratelimit-reset seconds on a 429; the default is 1,000 calls an hour
3. Page lists with per_page up to 100 and the returned cursor instead of numbered pages
4. Use a job, not a service, for anything that finishes; services bill until paused or deleted
5. Fetch any docs page with .md appended to get Markdown