DeepInfra review: a low-cost AI inference provider with a huge catalog
Answer in brief: DeepInfra ranks #4 among the best AI inference providers and is our pick for cost-sensitive, high-volume workloads. It serves more than 150 open-source models through OpenAI-compatible APIs, on GPUs it owns across eight US data centers. List prices are among the lowest we found: DeepSeek-V4-Flash at $0.09 / $0.18 per 1M tokens, and Llama 3.1 8B Turbo at $0.02 / $0.04. There are no long-term contracts.
Independent research, checked 2026-11-09 against DeepInfra's pricing page and Series B announcement. We did not test the product hands-on.
Deep catalog, shallow bill
DeepInfra is built for one thing: serving inference efficiently at scale. It says it owns and operates its GPU infrastructure end to end. Its catalog spans text generation, embeddings, rerankers, speech recognition, text-to-speech, image, video and music models, alongside proprietary Gemini and Claude models. Language models are mostly priced per token. Most other models are billed for inference execution time, so you only pay for what you use.
Who DeepInfra fits best
DeepInfra fits startups and scale-ups running large token volumes, teams building RAG pipelines that also need embeddings and rerankers from the same vendor, and anyone who wants long-context DeepSeek V4 models (listed at 1024k context) at low list prices.
Why teams pick DeepInfra
- Rock-bottom list prices: DeepSeek-V4-Flash $0.09 input ($0.018 cached) / $0.18 output; Llama 3.3 70B Turbo $0.10 / $0.32; Mistral-Nemo $0.029 / $0.03; Gemma 3 4B $0.05 / $0.10.
- Frontier open models, often discounted: GLM-5.3 was listed 38% off at $0.5625 / $2.50 (down from $0.90 / $4.00), and Kimi-K3 at $2.85 / $14.25.
- Huge context: DeepSeek V4 and GLM-5.x models are listed at 1024k context.
- Enterprise basics: DeepInfra states zero data retention and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification.
- Momentum: a $107M Series B on May 4, 2026, co-led by 500 Global and Georges Harik with participation from NVIDIA, Samsung Next, Supermicro and others. DeepInfra reported 25x token growth since its Series A.
- GPU instances and clusters are available when you need raw compute.
The honest drawbacks
- It publicly describes fewer reserved-capacity and SLA products than Together AI or Fireworks AI.
- Temporary discounts mean the effective price can change, so lock in your estimates against the live page.
- The announced data-center footprint is US-only, though DeepInfra says more locations are rolling out globally.
- Execution-time billing for non-LLM models is harder to forecast than per-token pricing.
Pricing at a glance
| Model | Input / output per 1M tokens |
|---|---|
| DeepSeek-V4-Flash | $0.09 / $0.18 (1024k context) |
| DeepSeek-V4-Pro | $1.30 / $2.60 |
| Llama 3.1 8B Instruct Turbo | $0.02 / $0.04 |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct Turbo | $0.10 / $0.32 |
| GLM-5.3 (38% off at time of check) | $0.5625 / $2.50 |
Best DeepInfra alternatives
- Together AI: a similar breadth, plus Provisioned Throughput with an SLA.
- Baseten: the lowest gpt-oss-120b price we found and dedicated deployments for custom models.
- Nebius Token Factory: EU and US dedicated endpoints with a 99.9% SLA.
DeepInfra FAQ
Is DeepInfra OpenAI-compatible?
Yes. DeepInfra says it serves 150+ open-source models through OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Does DeepInfra require a contract?
No. DeepInfra says there are no long-term contracts or upfront costs; you pay for what you use.
Where does DeepInfra run?
DeepInfra says it owns and operates GPUs across eight US data centers, with more locations rolling out globally.
Sources
- DeepInfra pricing
- DeepInfra $107M Series B (May 4, 2026)
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