Staxly

Together AI vs DigitalOcean

Open-source LLM infra — inference + fine-tuning + dedicated GPUs + image/video/audio
vs. The developer cloud — Droplets, Kubernetes, Managed DBs, App Platform

Together AI website ↗Try DigitalOcean ($200 credit) ↗

Pricing tiers

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
Together AI website ↗

DigitalOcean

Functions (Serverless)
Free 90k GB-sec/month. $0.0000185 per GB-sec after.
$0 base (usage-based)
App Platform — Free
Static sites free forever. 3 static sites per account.
Free
Droplet — Basic 512MB
Shared CPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, 500 GiB transfer. Cheapest starting tier.
$4/mo
Spaces Object Storage
$5/month — 250 GB storage + 1 TB outbound. S3-compatible.
$5/mo
App Platform — Basic
$5/month per app. 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 GB bandwidth.
$5/mo
Droplet — Basic 1GB
Shared CPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD.
$6/mo
Kubernetes (DOKS)
Starts at $12/month (1 node). Control plane free.
$12/mo
Droplet — Basic 2GB
1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer.
$12/mo
Load Balancer
$12/month. Supports HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
$12/mo
Managed Postgres — Basic
1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD. Single node.
$15/mo
Droplet — CPU Optimized
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM dedicated. Best for CPU-bound workloads.
$42/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume discounts, dedicated support.
Custom
Try DigitalOcean ($200 credit) ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing payg on Together AI vs functions on DigitalOcean.

MetricTogether AIDigitalOcean
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

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.

DigitalOcean · 14 features

  • App Platform — Heroku-style PaaS. Deploy from Git. Auto-HTTPS, auto-scale, zero-downtime deploy…
  • Backups — Weekly automated backups (20% of Droplet cost). Manual snapshots.
  • Block Storage Volumes — SSD block storage attachable to Droplets. Snapshot support.
  • DigitalOcean GenAI Platform — Managed AI agents, model-as-a-service (Llama, Mistral), knowledge bases.
  • DNS — Free DNS hosting for your domains.
  • DOKS (Kubernetes) — Managed Kubernetes. Free control plane. Node auto-repair.
  • Droplets — Virtual machines with shared or dedicated CPU. 20+ one-click Marketplace images.
  • Functions — Serverless functions. Node, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby. Pay-per-execution.
  • Load Balancers — Layer 4/7 load balancing with HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
  • Managed Databases — Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, Valkey. Automated backups + …
  • Marketplace — 300+ one-click Droplet + Kubernetes apps.
  • Monitoring — Built-in metrics + alerts for Droplets, DBs, Load Balancers.
  • Spaces — S3-compatible object storage with built-in CDN.
  • VPC — Private networking. Free. Automatic default VPC per region.

Developer interfaces

KindTogether AIDigitalOcean
CLITogether CLIdoctl CLI
SDKtogether-js, together-pythongodo (Go), pydo (official py), python-digitalocean
RESTCode Sandbox / Interpreter, Dedicated Endpoints, Together REST API (OpenAI-compat)DigitalOcean REST API
MCP—DigitalOcean MCP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Together AI and DigitalOcean may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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