Baseten vs AWS: Stop Paying Rent on Idle GPUs
AWS is the Costco of cloud: you can get anything, but you’ll probably get lost, buy way too much, and still forget the thing you came for. Great if you need 1,000 different services. Brutal if you just want to run a model without building a small DevOps team on the side.
Baseten is the opposite: one focused tool, fast, cheap, and actually fun to use. Here’s why startups are picking it over AWS:
1. Capacity Without Paperwork
On AWS, GPU access is like renting an apartment in New York. Fill out forms, wait weeks, pray your quota increase comes through. With Baseten, GPUs just… show up. It pulls from 10+ clouds like a secret black market of compute. No begging a hyperscaler rep to please approve your tickets.
2. Cold Starts That Don’t Make You Age
AWS: 30–120 seconds to boot a model. Enough time for your PM to ask, “Is it live yet?” Baseten: 5–10 seconds. You hit deploy, grab a sip of coffee, and it’s ready. That’s the difference between “let’s test another iteration” and “let’s all go home.”
3. Pay-Per-Use, Not Pay-for-Existence
AWS charges like a bad roommate who splits rent even when they’re out of town. Baseten charges like a WeWork desk — you pay only when you’re actually using it. Most teams save 40–60% and stop burning budget on idle GPUs that just sit there twiddling their tensor cores.
4. Devs > Infra Engineers
AWS wants you knee-deep in Terraform and Kubernetes YAML at 2 a.m. Baseten wants you writing Python and shipping. It strips out the undifferentiated heavy lifting and makes it feel like adding an API call, not building a power plant.
5. Alignment of Incentives
AWS optimizes for AWS. Baseten optimizes for you. The bigger the shared pool of users, the cheaper and faster the service gets. For once, scaling doesn’t mean your cloud bill scales faster than your ARR.
The TL;DR
AWS is the sprawling corporate landlord. Baseten is the hacker house with fast Wi-Fi and cheap rent. If you’re a startup trying to get models into production without spinning up a DevOps army, Baseten is the obvious choice.
Who Wins?
This is not a winner take all market. AWS will always dominate Fortune 500s that want one vendor and a massive account team. But there is room, and real demand, for multiple players who specialize. Baseten wins with startups and mid-market teams who value speed, cost, and simplicity over bloat. Fireworks.ai, Modal, Lambda, and others will also carve out niches. The likely outcome is not one king of AI infrastructure, but an ecosystem: hyperscalers serving the incumbents, and nimble platforms like Baseten powering the next generation of builders.
