Google Gemini API vs Together AI
Gemini 2.5 Pro, Flash, Flash-Lite — multimodal + 2M context
vs. Open-source LLM infra — inference + fine-tuning + dedicated GPUs + image/video/audio
Pricing tiers
Google Gemini API
Free Tier (AI Studio)
Generous free tier with rate limits. Good for dev + prototyping. Data may be used to improve Google products.
Free
Paid API (Gemini API)
Pay-as-you-go per-token. Data NOT used for training.
$0 base (usage-based)
Vertex AI (GCP)
Enterprise deployment via Google Cloud. Same pricing structure + GCP features (IAM, VPC-SC, CMEK).
$0 base (usage-based)
Gemini Enterprise
Custom. Gemini 2.5 Deep Think model access + Google Workspace + Agentspace.
Custom
Together AI
Pay-as-you-go
Per-token pricing for serverless inference. No minimum.
$0 base (usage-based)
Dedicated Endpoints
Single-tenant GPU endpoints billed hourly.
$0 base (usage-based)
Batch API (50% off)
50% discount for async batch processing on most serverless models.
$0 base (usage-based)
Reserved GPU Clusters
6+ day commitments with discounted reserved rates.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. Private deployments, VPC, SLAs, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free-tier on Google Gemini API vs payg on Together AI.
| Metric | Google Gemini API | Together AI |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Google Gemini API · 11 features
- Batch API — 50% discount for async processing.
- Code Execution — Python code interpreter tool (sandboxed).
- Context Caching — Cache system instructions + tools for up to 90% savings.
- File API — Upload large files (up to 2 GB) for multimodal prompts.
- Function Calling — JSON schema-based tool calling. Parallel supported.
- generateContent API — Core generation endpoint.
- Grounding with Search — Augment answers with Google Search results. Fact-checked citations returned.
- Model Tuning — Supervised fine-tuning via AI Studio.
- Multimodal Live API — Bidirectional streaming voice + video (WebSocket).
- Safety Settings — Configurable thresholds for harm categories.
- streamGenerateContent — Streaming variant with SSE.
Together AI · 14 features
- Audio (ASR + TTS) — Whisper Large v3 + Cartesia Sonic-3.
- Batch API — 50% discount for async processing.
- Code Interpreter — LLM with integrated code execution.
- Code Sandbox — Secure Python execution environment.
- Dedicated Endpoints — Single-tenant GPU endpoints for consistent latency.
- Embeddings — BGE + nomic + mxbai embedding models.
- Fine-Tuning — LoRA + full fine-tune + DPO on Llama, Qwen, Mistral.
- Image Generation — FLUX.2, SD3, Ideogram, etc.
- OpenAI-Compat API — Drop-in OpenAI SDK replacement.
- Private Deploy — Dedicated tenant + VPC.
- Reranker — Rerank model for RAG retrieval refinement.
- Reserved Clusters — Discounted GPU clusters for committed use.
- Serverless Inference — 200+ open models. OpenAI-compatible API.
- Video Generation — Veo 3.0, Kling 2.1, Vidu 2.0.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Google Gemini API | Together AI |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Together CLI |
| SDK | @google/genai, google-genai-go, google-genai (Python) | together-js, together-python |
| REST | Gemini REST API, Vertex AI Endpoint | Code Sandbox / Interpreter, Dedicated Endpoints, Together REST API (OpenAI-compat) |
| MCP | Gemini MCP | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Google Gemini API and Together AI are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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