Replicate alternatives

Why people look for an alternative to Replicate

• Many models bill by GPU-seconds of runtime ($0.000025–$0.0112/sec), which means a cold start or a slow prompt costs more for the same output and a request cannot be priced before it is sent.
• The prediction API is its own shape. Code written against it does not move to an OpenAI-compatible provider without rewriting the call sites.
• Text pricing is not competitive — DeepSeek-R1 is listed at $3.75 per 1M input tokens — so a workload that started as image or video and grew a text component pays for it.

Every figure attributed to a provider on this page is that provider’s own published information as of September 2026. Where a provider publishes no number, this page says so rather than estimating one. If something here is out of date, tell us and we’ll correct it — including in a competitor’s favour.

The alternatives, in order of fit

Ordered against the reasons above rather than by preference. Each one carries what it costs you, because an option listed without a trade-off is a recommendation wearing a survey’s clothes.

1. 1

   AI Token Router

   That’s us

   Best for: The two stated reasons directly. A published per-token rate per model means you can price a request before you send it, and the endpoint is OpenAI-compatible across chat/completions, responses, completions, embeddings, images, speech and video — so if your code already speaks the OpenAI SDK you change a base URL rather than your call sites.

   Trade-off: Our catalogue is 24 curated models with seven callable today, against Replicate's thousands. We do not accept your own weights and there is no Cog equivalent, so a custom or very new model is simply not available. On video we are worse: Replicate bills Wan 2.1 on actual output length at $0.09/sec (480p) and $0.25/sec (720p), while we bill every clip at a fixed five-second duration during rollout.

2. 2

   Novita AI

   Best for: Keeping breadth across modalities without GPU-seconds billing. 200+ models across text, image, audio, video and vision, per-token serverless pricing, Kling v3.0 billed on actual output length at $0.084–$0.168 per second, and small-model text rates at the market floor — Llama 3.1 8B at $0.02/$0.05 per 1M.

   Trade-off: Their homepage and pricing page disagree on DeepSeek V4 Pro ($1.74/$3.48 against $1.60/$3.20), and the headline saving claim is unsourced. Six product surfaces share one account, mixing per-token serverless with hourly GPU billing on the same invoice.

   AI Token Router vs Novita AI, side by side

3. 3

   Hyperbolic

   Best for: Anyone using Replicate to run their own weights. If what you want is compute rather than tokens, Hyperbolic sells on-demand H100 / H200 / B200 with no quota limits and no long-term contract, and a route through reserved clusters to private cloud as the workload grows.

   Trade-off: Their /pricing and /inference pages both return 404, and no per-token rate card exists anywhere on their domain — so this is a move away from billing you cannot forecast toward billing you cannot look up. Their own billing docs describe serverless inference as billed per API call, a unit that does not scale with request size, and no current model list is published.

   AI Token Router vs Hyperbolic, side by side

4. 4

   DeepInfra

   Best for: A text workload that outgrew Replicate's text pricing. DeepInfra runs its own GPU fleet and is frequently the lowest published rate on open text models, across a broad open-model catalogue.

   Trade-off: Video support is limited, so this replaces only the text half of a mixed workload. They publish their own rate with no official rate beside it, spending controls are account-level, and the time to add a newly released model varies.

   AI Token Router vs DeepInfra, side by side

Where the rates land, model by model

Only the models we can serve today and Replicate carries as well. Our claim is that we price below the model publisher’s official rate — not that we are the cheapest anywhere — so where a provider comes in under us on a model, that row says so.

Rates exclude cached input, which is published per model on the pricing page and dominates any workload with a repeated prefix. This table covers our servable catalogue only — the other providers on this page carry models we do not, at rates we have not verified per model and therefore do not print.

What actually changes in your code

This is the one migration on this list that is not a configuration change. Replicate's prediction API has its own request and response shape — you create a prediction and poll or stream it — so moving to an OpenAI-compatible provider means rewriting the call sites, not repointing them. Budget for that honestly. In exchange the rewrite is mostly deletion: an OpenAI-compatible endpoint returns the result on the same request, so the polling loop, the webhook handler and the prediction-status state machine all disappear. Custom models deployed with Cog have no destination here at all — those need a GPU provider, not a token provider.

The step-by-step version lives in the migration guide.

Questions

Why is Replicate's billing hard to predict?

Many models bill by GPU-seconds of runtime, in the range $0.000025–$0.0112/sec, so the invoice reflects how long the GPU was busy rather than what you asked for. A cold start or a slow prompt costs more for identical output. A published per-token or per-second rate does not behave that way.

Is there an OpenAI-compatible alternative to Replicate?

Ours is, across chat/completions, responses, completions, embeddings, images, speech and video — point base_url at us and the OpenAI SDK works. That means changing a base URL instead of rewriting call sites, which is usually the largest single cost of leaving Replicate.

Where do I run a custom or very new model instead?

Nowhere on the token side of this list. We serve a curated catalogue and do not accept your own weights, and neither do the other serverless providers here. If you use Cog to deploy your own models, the equivalent is renting GPUs — Hyperbolic sells on-demand H100 / H200 / B200 with no quota limits — or staying on Replicate.

Which alternative is best for video?

Replicate itself is hard to beat for breadth, and it bills Wan 2.1 on actual output length at $0.09/sec (480p) and $0.25/sec (720p). Novita AI bills Kling v3.0 on actual length at $0.084–$0.168 per second. We publish per-second rates but bill at a fixed five-second duration during rollout, which is worse than either for short clips and a reason to stay if short video is most of your usage.