Generative AI — enterprise stack.
For each requirement below, pick the option that fits your build — recommended first, then free and cheaper alternatives — or skip what your project doesn't need. Tap the info icon next to any requirement to see why it matters.
GPU Inference Compute (A10G / A100 / H100)
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsModal: Free $30/mo credit, A10G $0.32/hr ($0.000089/sec), A100 40GB $1.60/hr, H100 $3.95/hr, 0s scale, concurrency auto. Colab: Free 1x T4 (15GB) ~12hr limit, 0$/mo. RunPod: Serverless $0.00021/sec for 24GB (A10G ~ $0.45/hr), $0.00058/sec H100 ~ $2.10/hr, free $5 credit. AWS p5.48xlarge 8x H100 $98.32/hr (~$12.29/hr per GPU). Overage: billed per 100ms.
Inference Hosting Platform (Serverless GPU)
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsTogether AI: Free $25 credit, Llama 3.1 70B $0.88/1M input $0.88/1M output, FLUX.1 schnell $0.0023/image, autoscale included. HF Free: Rate limit ~1k req/day for public models, no GPU guarantee. Replicate: Pay-per-second, Llama 3 70B $0.65/1M tokens, SDXL $0.0023/sec (~$0.00045/run), free $5 credit. Anyscale: $0/mo control plane + $0.15/1M tokens managed + underlying GPU $1.5-4/hr; free trial $10.
Model Hosting & Model Registry
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsHF Endpoints: CPU $0.06/hr, T4 $0.60/hr, A10G $0.90/hr, A100 $1.64/hr, H100 $4.1/hr billed per minute; Free Hub: unlimited public models, 100GB storage free. Replicate: free registry, pay per run as above. Baseten: Free $25/mo credit, then Dedicated $0.08/hr overhead + GPUs (A10G $0.85/hr, H100 $5/hr), TRT-LLM optimized, free 100k inference calls tier deprecated, now usage-based.
LLM API Gateway & Multi-Provider Router
Controls and protects your APIs — quotas, abuse prevention, and firewalls. Important once you have real traffic or many clients.Pricing & free-tier limitsPortkey: Free 10k requests/mo, Growth $49/mo includes 50k req + $0.0005/req overage, fallbacks/retries/balancing. LiteLLM: Free OSS self-host, pay infra $5-20/mo VPS, tracks OpenAI $0.005/1k GPT-4o input, $0.015/1k output; Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet $3/1M input $15/1M output. Cloudflare AI Gateway: Free 100k logs/day, $5/mo Workers + $0.50/million requests over. Zuplo: Free 10k req/mo, $250/mo for 1M req, overage $0.0002/req.
Vector Database for RAG (Prompt Context)
Persistent storage for your app’s data — users, products, orders. The single most important architectural decision for most projects.Pricing & free-tier limitsQdrant Free: 1GB RAM, up to 4M vectors x768d (approx), 1 cluster free forever; Starter $25/mo 2GB, $50/mo 4GB; Overage $0.20/GB storage. Weaviate Serverless Free: 14-day trial + free sandbox 1M vectors; Paid $25/mo starter. Pinecone Free: 100k vectors (~400MB), 1 index; Starter $70/mo includes writes $0.20/million + reads $2/1M + storage $0.33/GB; gcp-starter p2. Supabase: Free 500MB DB, pgvector extension free, $25/mo Pro 8GB.
File Storage for Generated Media (S3-Compatible)
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsR2 Free: 10GB storage, 10M Class A + 10M Class B ops/mo, 0 egress fee. Paid $0.015/GB-mo storage, $4.50/million Class A, $0.36/million Class B, zero egress. B2 Free 10GB, $0.006/GB-mo, download $0.01/GB, first 1GB/day free egress. S3 Free 5GB for 12mo only, then $0.023/GB-mo, PUT $0.005/1k, GET $0.0004/1k, egress $0.09/GB first 10TB.
Media Delivery CDN (Images/Video/Audio)
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsCloudflare Free: Unlimited bandwidth, 100k cache purge/day, global 300+ PoPs, $0/mo. Pro $20/mo adds WAF + image optimization 5k. BunnyCDN Free 14-day trial then $1/mo min, $0.01/GB NA/EU egress, $0.03 SG, free SSL. Fastly: $0/mo dev $50/mo minimum, $0.12/GB first 10TB, $0.02/10k req overage, free $500 credit first month.
Background Jobs & Async Generation Queue
Runs slow work (emails, exports, payouts) in the background so users don’t wait. Keeps your app snappy.Pricing & free-tier limitsInngest Free: 50k step runs/mo, 1k concurrency, 7-day history. Growth $49/mo 250k runs + $0.16/1k overage, 1yr retention. Trigger.dev Free: 10k tasks/mo self-host unlimited, Cloud $29/mo 50k tasks $0.0006/task over. QStash Free 500 msgs/day, $10/mo 2k/day + $0.02/100 msgs over. SQS: 1M free/mo forever, then $0.40/million req + Step State $0.025/1k transitions.
API Gateway + Rate Limiting for Gen-API
Controls and protects your APIs — quotas, abuse prevention, and firewalls. Important once you have real traffic or many clients.Pricing & free-tier limitsUpstash Rate Limit Free: 10k requests/day (Global). Paid $10/mo 100k/day, overage $0.20/100k. Unkey: Free 2.5k verifications/day, Pro $25/mo 150k + $0.05/1k over. Cloudflare API Shield: Free 1M gateway req, $20/mo Pro + $0.03/10k over. AWS API Gateway: Free 1M calls first 12mo, then $3.50/million + $0.09/GB egress.
Usage Metering (Tokens/Images/Seconds)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsOpenMeter OSS: Free self-host, unlimited events, metered billing aggregation. Cloud Free 1M events/mo, Pro $250/mo 10M events, $25/million over. Lago OSS Free 100M events self-host, Cloud Free 250k events, Starter $199/mo 1M events + $0.15/1k metered. Metronome: $2k/mo platform fee minimum + 0.5% of metered revenue, free proof-of-concept tier.
Billing & Subscriptions (Usage-Based)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsStripe Billing: Free 0.7% of recurring volume + 0.5% metered billing fee; Stripe fees 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Free tier: first $1M billing waived? Billing itself free until $100k processed. Lago OSS free, Cloud Free dev, Pro $199/mo as above. Polar: 4% + $0.30 per trans + billing included, free tier unlimited products. Stripe Tax +0.5% per transaction.
Caching (Prompt Cache + KV + Semantic Cache)
Stores frequent results in fast memory so you serve less from the database. Big lever for speed and cost.Pricing & free-tier limitsUpstash Free: 10k commands/day, 256MB, TLS, global replication. Pay-as-you-go $0.20/100k commands + $0.25/GB storage; $10/mo fixed 100MB. Redis Cloud Free 30MB; Essentials $5/mo 250MB + $0.20/100k ops. ElastiCache Serverless: Free trial 1mo, then $0.125/GB-hour + $0.14/million ECPUs. Semantic cache hit saves ~80% LLM cost $0.005/1k tokens.
Webhooks for Generation Completion
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsSvix Cloud Free: 50 messages/day, 5 apps, 7-day retention. Growth $59/mo 50k messages + $0.0002/msg over, 90-day retention, retries 72h. Hookdeck Free 500 events/day, 3d retention; Team $99/mo 50k events + 15d, over $0.001/event. Self-host Svix OSS free unlimited, infra cost ~$10/mo.
Content Moderation API (Generated Content)
Manages the content and assets you publish without editing code. Essential for sites with frequent updates.Pricing & free-tier limitsOpenAI Moderation: Free unlimited up to rate limit, 6 categories. Hive Free 2k images/mo, then $0.0008/image ($0.80/1k) for visual, $0.0005/1k chars text. Sightengine Free 2k ops/mo, Starter $29/mo 10k ops + $0.002/op over. AWS Rekognition Image Moderation: Free 5k/mo first yr, then $1/1k images over 1M $0.80/1k.
NSFW Detection & Filtering (Self-Host Option)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsNudeNet OSS: Free Apache2, run on CPU ~100ms/image, infra cost $0 (self-host on existing GPU box). LAION Safety Checker free, ~0.04s CLIP based. Sightengine $29/mo bundle includes NSFW 10k imgs, over $0.002/image. Hive NSFW $0.0006/image volume. Self-host savings: ~$800/1M images vs API.
Image/Video Optimization & Transform CDN
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsCloudflare Images Free: 5k delivered/mo? Actually $5/mo includes 100k stored + 100k delivered, $5/100k extra, transforms $0.50/1k. Bunny Optimizer $9/mo min + $20/1M transformations. Imgproxy OSS free self-host $5-15/mo compute. Cloudinary Free 25k transformations/mo, 25GB storage, bandwidth 25GB; Growth $89/mo 30k transforms + $0.14/1k over, storage $0.20/GB.
Monitoring for Inference Latency & Errors (APM)
Tells you when things break and why. You cannot fix what you cannot see — this is how you keep downtime short.Pricing & free-tier limitsHelicone Free: 10k LLM requests/mo, 7-day retention, caching included. Pro $25/mo 1M req, $0.01/1k over, 30-day log. Grafana Cloud Free: 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 10k metrics forever. Datadog APM: $31/host/mo, LLM Observability addon $0.002/trace ($2/1k traces), free 14-day trial. Langfuse Free Cloud 50k obs/mo.
Logging & Request Tracing (LLM Observability)
Tells you when things break and why. You cannot fix what you cannot see — this is how you keep downtime short.Pricing & free-tier limitsLangfuse Free: 50k observations/mo (~50k LLM calls), 2 members, 30-day retention. Cloud Pro $39/mo 100k obs + $0.08/1k over, unlimited members. Axiom Free 500GB ingest/mo? Actually 500MB free? Correct: Free 500MB/mo ingest, $25/mo 10GB + $0.25/GB over. LangSmith: Free 5k traces/mo, Plus $39/mo 10k traces + $0.50/1k over.
Prompt Management & Versioning (PromptOps)
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsLangfuse Prompts: Included free 50k obs, versioning, rollout AB. Pro same as above. Portkey Prompts: Free 10k requests includes prompts, Growth $49/mo 50k requests includes 100 prompt versions. Humanloop Free 5 users 10k logs/mo, Pro $199/mo 100k logs. LangSmith Hub: Free public prompts, private requires Plus $39/mo.
Feature Flags for Model Versions & A/B
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsPostHog Free: 1M events/mo includes 100k flag requests/mo, unlimited flags, $0/mo. GrowthBook Free OSS self-host unlimited flags; Cloud Free 20k SDK connections/mo; Pro $20/mo 100k. Flagsmith Free 50k req/mo; Growth $45/mo 300k. LaunchDarkly Free 1k MAU, Standard $10/mo per 1k MAU context, over $0.008/MAU, includes experimentation.
Evaluation & Testing Framework (LLM Evals)
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsBraintrust Free: 10k logged events/mo, 1k eval scores, 5 members. Growth $100/mo 50k events $1.50/1k over. LangSmith Evals: Free 5k traces/mo evals included; Plus $39/mo 10k traces. W&B Weave: Free 25k eval rows, Team $50/user/mo + $0.10/1k LLM calls traces. Langfuse Evals: free tier includes experiments.
Training Experiment Tracking (MLOps)
Ships features to a subset of users or toggles them without redeploying. De-risks releases and enables experiments.Pricing & free-tier limitsMLflow OSS: Free self-host $5-20/mo VM, artifact storage S3/R2 cost $0.015/GB. W&B Free: 100GB tracking, 1 member personal; Teams $25/user/mo includes 100GB/mo + $0.40/GB tracked hours over, 500GB artifact storage free. Comet ML Free 1 user 100 experiments, Community free unlimited. Paid $49/user/mo 500GB storage.
Search for Generated Assets (Library Search)
Lets users find things fast. A slow or missing search directly costs engagement and conversions.Pricing & free-tier limitsMeilisearch OSS Free self-host unlimited; Cloud Free 10k docs, 10k searches/mo; Starter $30/mo 100k docs + 500k searches, $0.10/10k searches over. Typesense OSS Free; Cloud Free 100k docs 50k searches; $14/mo 500k docs. Algolia Free 10k records 10k search req/mo; Growth $89/mo 100k records + 100k req + $0.40/1k searches over.
Authentication & User Management (API Keys + Auth)
How users sign up, log in, and are authorized. Getting roles and access control right early prevents painful rewrites.Pricing & free-tier limitsClerk Free: 10k MAU, unlimited API keys, social logins, $0/mo. Paid $25/mo + $0.04/MAU over 10k. Supabase Auth Free 50k MAU, external OAuth included $0. Auth0 Free 25k MAU, Essentials $35/mo 500 MAU? Actually Starter $35/mo 500 MAU + $0.05/MAU over, Enterprise $800+/mo. WorkOS Free 1M MAU for auth.
Queuing & Priority for GPU Jobs
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsModal Queues: Included in compute, $0/mo queue ops, billed GPU sec only. Cloudflare Queues Free 10k ops/day, Standard $5/mo 10M ops $0.40/million over. Upstash QStash Free 500/day, $10/mo 3k/day priority. SQS FIFO Free 1M/mo year 1, then $0.50/million, FIFO higher ordering. Redis Cloud Queue: $5/mo 30MB free.
Watermarking & Provenance (C2PA)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsinvisible-watermark OSS Free, Python 0ms overhead, infra $0. C2PA Tool OSS free, requires cert $50/yr. Cloudflare Content Credentials free beta, preserves provenance free. Imatag Free 100 imgs/mo watermark, Pro $99/mo 20k images $0.004/img over. Steg.AI $149/mo 50k marks $0.001/over. Compute trivial on CPU/GPU.
Model Fine-tuning Infrastructure
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsTogether FT: $5-30/hr GPU + storage $0.10/GB-mo. Example Llama 3.1 8B 10k rows ~ $5. Unsloth Free OSS, requires GPU rental RunPod $0.45/hr A10G. Fireworks FT $1-10/hr, LoRA $0.50/1M tokens training. OpenAI FT: Training $3/1M tokens input GPT-3.5, $25/1M GPT-4o-mini, hosted $1.70/1M inference (mini). Anyscale FT $0.50/1M tokens + GPU. Storage free tier 10GB.
Data Pipeline for Training & Feedback (ETL)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsAirbyte OSS Free self-host unlimited connectors $10-30/mo VM. Cloud Free 100M rows sync? Actually $0/mo 1 connection trial, then $2.50/credit. Fivetran Free 500k rows/mo, Starter $120/mo 1Mo active rows $0.30/M over. Dagster OSS Free, Cloud Free 2k runs/mo, Starter $100/mo 10k runs. Snowplow free self-host.
Secrets Management for API Keys
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsInfisical OSS Free self-host unlimited secrets, Cloud Free 5 projects 500 secrets. Doppler Free 5 users unlimited secrets? Actually Free up to 5 users + 1000 secrets, Starter $8/user/mo. Vault Cloud Free dev 1k secrets, Starter $0.035/secret/mo minimum $70/mo. AWS Secrets Manager Free 30 days trial, then $0.40/secret/mo + $0.05/10k API calls.
Email Service for Generation Notifications
Sending transactional email (receipts, resets, alerts) and sometimes marketing mail. Deliverability matters more than features here.Pricing & free-tier limitsResend Free 3k emails/mo + 100/day limit. Pro $20/mo 50k emails + $0.0008/email over ($0.80/1k). Amazon SES Free 3k/mo within sandbox then $0.10/1k emails ($0.0001/email) + $0.12/GB attachments, free tier 3k. Postmark Free 100/mo, $15/mo 10k emails $1.25/1k over. SendGrid Free 100/day 3k/mo, Essentials $15/mo 50k.
DDoS Protection & WAF for GPU Endpoints
Controls and protects your APIs — quotas, abuse prevention, and firewalls. Important once you have real traffic or many clients.Pricing & free-tier limitsCloudflare Free: 5 WAF custom rules, unlimited DDoS L3/L4 $0/mo. Pro $20/mo 20 rules, Enterprise $5k/mo min includes 100+ rules, 100TB managed DDoS, SLA 100%. Fastly WAF: Free rules, $20/mo + $0.02/request for WAF eval. AWS Shield Advanced $3k/mo + data transfer.
Data Warehouse for Usage Analytics
Understands your users and supports them. Drives product decisions and retention.Pricing & free-tier limitsClickHouse OSS Free self-host $10/mo VM. Cloud Free 30-day $300 credit trial, Dev $0/mo? Actually Starter $0/mo credits consumed: Compute $0.30/vCPU-hr, storage $0.12/GB-mo, 5GB free. BigQuery Free 10GB storage + 1TB query/mo, then $0.02/GB storage $5/TB query. Snowflake $2/credit (1 credit = 1 vCPU-hr), storage $23/TB/mo, free $400 credit trial 30 days.
SOC2 / Compliance & Audit Logging
Keeps you secure and compliant with regulations. Required for enterprise customers and handling sensitive data.Pricing & free-tier limitsVanta Free? Actually no free tier, Starter $3k/yr for SOC2 readiness, Growth $10k/yr includes monitoring + vendor risk. Drata Free trial 14d, Starter $4k/yr. Audit logging via Axiom $25/mo 10GB, CloudTrail free + S3 storage $0.023/GB. Compliance automation saves $30k audit cost. Vanta scales: $10k-$25k/yr plus $99/mo per employee security training.
Multi-Region Inference Deployment
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFly.io Free: 3x shared VMs 256MB, $5/mo credit. GPU A10G $0.80/hr, A100 $2.50/hr per region, billed per second, multi-region deploy free. Cloudflare Workers AI: Free $5/mo includes 10k neurons/day; Paid $0.011/1k tokens Llama. Modal global included $0 extra over GPU/hr. AWS Global Accelerator $0.025/hr + DT-Premium $0.035/GB + regional P5 costs replicated.
Dedicated VPC & Private GPU Cluster
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsTailscale Free 3 users 100 devices VPN overlay $0/mo. RunPod Secure Cloud $0/mo overhead + GPU $0.60/hr A100 Secure $0.85/hr, isolated. CoreWeave VPC: No overhead, H100 bare metal $4.25/hr reserved, $6/hr on-demand, minimum $2k committed. AWS VPC Free but PrivateLink $0.01/hr per endpoint + $0.01/GB. Modal Private deploy Enterprise $500/mo min + GPU costs.
Support & SLA Package (Model Provider Support)
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsCommunity Free $0/mo best-effort. Together Growth includes Slack premium $0 extra, Enterprise $2k/mo minimum includes 99.9% SLA + 4hr P1. OpenAI Tier 4+ $0/mo support but Enterprise $0/mo min negotiable >$50k/mo usage includes 99.9%. AWS Business Support $100/mo min or 10% usage, Enterprise $15k/mo min + 5%. CoreWeave Mission Critical $10k/mo + includes 99.95% GPU uptime.
Backup & Disaster Recovery for Models/Assets
Copies of your data so a bug, hack, or outage doesn’t become permanent loss. Cheap insurance every serious project needs.Pricing & free-tier limitsR2 Free versioning included 10GB free, storage $0.015/GB-mo. Backblaze B2 $0.006/GB-mo + download. S3 Replication: Storage $0.023/GB-mo x2 + CRR $0.02/1k requests + egress inter-region $0.02/GB. Litestream Free OSS S3 replication $0 + storage. Veeam $200/yr per 10 VMs. Estimated DR: R2 1TB $15/mo backup cost.
Cost Optimization & FinOps for GPU Spend
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsOpenCost OSS Free Kubecost GPU tracking $0/mo self-host. Vantage Free: $2k cloud cost visibility free, Pro $100/mo includes GPU cost per workload, Enterprise $750/mo+. Cast AI Free tier cluster optimization trial, Paid $0.20/vCPU-hr saved share model; GPU autoscaler $99/cluster/mo + 10% savings. Potential GPU savings 30-60% via spot/interruption: e.g., H100 spot $2.50/hr vs $4/hr on-demand $1.50/hr saved.
How this enterprise generative ai checklist works.
Each requirement below is something a enterprise generative ai build typically needs. Pick one of the four researched options — recommended, free, cheaper or paid — add your own with "Other", or skip the requirement if your project doesn't need it. Nothing is mandatory; the plan on the right tracks what you've decided so nothing gets forgotten.
Your picks are saved in this browser automatically, so you can come back anytime. Options are researched per build level and refreshed as vendors change their plans — always verify details on the provider's page before committing.