Top 10 open-model inference providers compared on price, speed and uptime, plus when owning a GPU pays off

Compared

Ten inference providers, priced on one reference model (Qwen3.8-27B), with a short check against owning a GPU

Based on

OpenRouter's provider table, a price tracker, Best Buy listings, community and press benchmarks

As of

20 Oct 2026 for prices, speed and uptime; benchmark runs from Aug to Oct 2026

Ten inference providers, meaning companies that run open models on their own servers and rent access by the token, charge $0.34 to $1.12 per million tokens for the reference model used here, Qwen3.8-27B. One of them, Cerebras, writes 478 tokens per second, about ten times the speed of a typical host. Owning a graphics card is the alternative: an RTX 5090 pays back against these providers in 8 to 44 months, and only at heavy use (600 million tokens a month).

The reference model is open-weight, which means its files are public and any company can run it. A token is a piece of a word, about three-quarters of one, so a million tokens is roughly 750,000 words. Providers bill input tokens (what is sent to the model) and output tokens (what it writes back) at separate rates, and output costs more. Every price below uses a mix of three input tokens to one output token, which is typical for coding and test work, where the model reads a lot and answers briefly. Prices for other open models differ, but the providers' relative positions are a useful guide.

The reference model

Qwen3.8-27B comes from Alibaba's Qwen team and was released on 14 Aug 2026 under the Apache 2.0 licence, which allows commercial use. "27B" means 27 billion parameters, the numbers that make up the model. It reads images as well as text and has a 262,144-token context window, which is how much text it can hold in one conversation (some providers serve 1 million). Artificial Analysis, as listed on OpenRouter, scores it 33.7 on its Intelligence Index and 68.1 on its Coding Index at the highest reasoning setting.

It was picked because it is the newest open Qwen small enough to run on one 32GB graphics card while leaving memory free for long conversations and tool calls, as the GPU section shows. Reflection's Beam is an example of an open model far too large for that.

How they were picked

Twenty providers list Qwen3.8-27B on OpenRouter, a service that routes requests to many hosts. The ten below are the five cheapest with at least 99.8% uptime over three days (Chutes, NEAR AI, Ionstream, Reka AI, Wafer), plus five better-known operators: Alibaba Cloud as the model's maker, and DeepInfra, Fireworks AI, Cerebras and Novita AI, which Hugging Face includes in its Inference Providers list. Nobody paid for a place. Together AI, Groq and Baseten host other Qwen models but show no Qwen3.8-27B price on OpenRouter or the price tracker.

Price

Blended price is (3 x input + output) / 4, per million tokens.

Blended price per million tokens, USD

Chutes	$0.34
NEAR AI	$0.37
Ionstream	$0.52
Reka AI	$0.58
Wafer	$0.61
DeepInfra	$0.78
Fireworks AI	$0.90
Alibaba Cloud	$0.96
Novita AI	$1.07
Cerebras	$1.12

The spread is 3.3x on the blended mix. DeepInfra showed a 25% promotion on OpenRouter ($0.15 input, $1.875 output), and the table uses its list price. Prices are moving fast: the price tracker reports the cheapest input price fell 92% in about 90 days, from $0.45 to $0.035, so any figure here should be rechecked before committing.

Speed, delay and uptime

Output speed is how many tokens per second the provider writes. Latency is OpenRouter's median response delay in seconds, and lower is better. Uptime is the share of the past three days that the provider answered requests.

The same model scores slightly differently at different providers, because each one configures and compresses it in its own way. OpenRouter's Exacto benchmarks show TAU-Bench (a test of multi-step tool use) between 78.1% on Ionstream and 80.7% on Cerebras among the five providers it lists, and GPQA Diamond (hard science questions) between 82.8% and 83.5%. Anyone running evals, which are repeatable test runs that score a model, should pin one provider and one reasoning setting so results stay comparable.

What stands out

• Cerebras is the fastest by a wide margin, with 0.51 s latency and 100% uptime. It has the highest input price ($0.99), so reading-heavy work costs the most there, while its $1.49 output price is below most providers.
• NEAR AI is the second cheapest blended with 100% uptime and the fastest of the cheap group.
• Chutes has the lowest blended price but the slowest speed and the longest delay.
• Fireworks AI charges a flat $0.90 both ways, which makes it the cheapest for output-heavy work and the dearest of the group for input-heavy work. It has no OpenRouter row, so its speed and uptime are not listed.
• Alibaba Cloud makes the model, and its 98.94% uptime is the only figure under 99%.

OpenRouter gives one API key that can route to any of these, with modes for balanced price and speed, fastest (Nitro) or cheapest (Floor), and it passes through each provider's own price. That makes it the quickest way to run the same test at several providers.

Extra: how an RTX 5090 compares

An RTX 5090 is a consumer graphics card with 32GB of video memory (VRAM). Running the model on it costs a one-time purchase instead of a per-token bill.

What fits in 32GB

Models are compressed ("quantized") to fit in VRAM. Q4 stores each number in 4 bits, which shrinks Qwen3.8-27B from roughly 54 GB at full precision to about 17 GiB with a small quality loss. VRAM also holds the conversation itself (the "KV cache"), and every tool call and result adds tokens to it. A model that fills the whole card leaves nothing for that.

The first five rows were measured by Computing for Geeks on a 24GB card, and the last by a user on an RTX 5090 in a Hugging Face thread. A full 262K-token session at a 4-bit cache adds about 5 GiB, so the Q4 setups leave room for a couple of long sessions at once. The Q6 setup leaves almost none and suits tool-heavy work poorly. MTP (multi-token prediction) drafts several tokens ahead for speed. For lighter jobs, Qwen3.5-9B at Q4 needs about 5.5 GB.

Price, stock and speed

The list price is $1,999, and Best Buy was far above that on 20 Oct 2026: ASUS TUF Gaming at $4,799.99, ROG Astral at $5,499.99 and a Gigabyte model at $9,079.99. An indexed listing showed the MSI Ventus 3X OC at $4,299.99, and used cards were $3,822 on eBay on 13 Oct per BestValueGPU. Press reports from 15 to 17 Oct say Best Buy showed near-zero stock. The calculations use $4,800 for the card alone and $6,300 with an assumed $1,500 PC around it.

Speed varies by software. Community runs report 126 tokens per second at Q4 and 90 to 142 with MTP, while Tom's Hardware measured about 20 without MTP in Sep 2026. The calculations use 100, which is about 940 million tokens a month at full load.

Months to pay back

Buying wins only when the saving per million tokens, after electricity (about $0.10 per million tokens), adds up to the purchase price.

At the $1,999 list price, the card alone pays back against DeepInfra in 30, 10 and 5 months at the same volumes. Only 600M is a realistic load for one card, which is about 64% utilization at 100 tokens per second. Renting a 5090 costs $0.40 to $0.99 per hour (median $0.64 per Beam, Oct 2026), or $0.49 to $0.76 per million tokens at full load, which does not beat the cheaper providers. Reasons to buy that are not about cost: code stays on the machine, there are no rate limits, spend is fixed, and fine-tuning is possible.

Assumptions behind the pay-back table

Qwen3.8-27B at Q4, 100 tokens per second writing and 3,000 tokens per second reading on one RTX 5090. An 800 W system draw under load (the card is rated 575 W) at $0.17 per kWh, which gives $0.10 per million blended tokens at 100 tokens per second and $0.20 at 50. Blended tokens are 75% input and 25% output. Hardware has no resale value, and time spent running the server is not counted. The $1,500 PC is an estimate.

Which fits whom

Sources

1. OpenRouter: Qwen3.8 27B: prices, speed, uptime, benchmarks
2. Price Per Token: Qwen3.8 27B: Fireworks AI price, price drop
3. QwenLM/Qwen3.8 on GitHub: release date, licence
4. Hugging Face Inference Providers: provider list
5. Best Buy: RTX 5090 listings: card prices
6. Tech Insider: RTX 5090 supply: stock reports
7. BestValueGPU: RTX 5090 price history: used price, power
8. llamaperf: community speeds
9. Unsloth discussion: RTX 5090 report: Q6 memory and MTP speeds
10. Tom's Hardware: Qwen 3.8 27B on RTX 5090: speed without MTP
11. Computing for Geeks: Qwen3.8-27B VRAM tests: memory by context
12. Codersera: Qwen 3.5 developer guide: Qwen3.5-9B memory
13. Beam: RTX 5090 pricing: rental prices