AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Serve 100 Large AI models on a single GPU with low impact to TTFT

I wanted to build an inference provider for proprietary AI models, but I did not have a huge GPU farm. I started experimenting with Serverless AI inference, but found out that coldstarts were huge. I went deep into the research and put together an engine that loads large models from SSD to VRAM up to ten times faster than alternatives. It works with vLLM, and transformers, and more coming soon. With this project you can hot-swap entire large models (32B) on demand. Its great for: Serverless AI Inference Robotics On Prem deployments Local Agents And Its open source. Let me know if anyone…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

1
General Compute▲315
AI models that run on an inference cloud optimized for speed
May 2026 · generalcompute.com · its alternatives →
2
ZeroGPU▲298
The compute efficient layer for AI inference
Jun 2026 · zerogpu.ai · its alternatives →
3
Cerebrium▲300
If you haven’t noticed, GPUs are scarce right now. The global boom in inference has demand growing faster than supply can keep up, and at Cerebrium ...
2024 · cerebrium.ai · its alternatives →
4
Inferless▲749
Deploy any machine learning models in minutes
2025 · inferless.com · its alternatives →
5
I've built a locally running Perplexity clonefree▲669
The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
Banana▲235
Serverless GPUs for Machine Learning inference
2022 · banana.dev · its alternatives →
7
We made our own inference engine for Apple Silicon▲186
We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
8IB
I built a toy TPU that can do inference and training on the XOR problem▲134
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
2025 · tinytpu.com · its alternatives →
9WM
We made glhf.chat – run almost any open-source LLM, including 405B▲161
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
10
Pip install inference, open source computer vision deployment▲71
Deploying vision models is time consuming and tedious. Setting up dependencies. Fixing conflicts. Configuring TRT acceleration. Flashing (and re-flashing) NVIDIA Jetsons. A streamlined, developer-friendly solution for inference is needed. We, the Roboflow team, have been hard at work open sourcing Inference, an open source vision deployment solution. Our solution is designed with developers in mind, offering a HTTP-based interface. Run models on your hardware without having to write architecture-specific inference code. Here's a demo showing how to go from a model to GPU inference on a video…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
Intel® GPU D-series▲76
Memory-rich AI inference without HBM
4d ago · intel.com · its alternatives →
12
50+ LLMs on 2 GPUs with 2-Second Swapping? We built AI-Native Runtime▲5
We've built InferX, a specialized runtime environment that fundamentally changes how LLMs are served. The core problem we solve is the latency bottleneck in AI inference, especially with large models. Current systems waste resources or suffer from painfully slow cold starts. InferX's AI-native architecture, with its "snapshot" technology, enables: * *Sub-2s cold starts:* Spin up models instantly. * *High density:* Serve more LLMs on the same GPUs. * *Optimal efficiency:* Maximize GPU utilization. This isn't just another API; it's a new execution layer designed from the ground up for the…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
SelfHostLLM▲134
A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.
2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →
14AT
A tiny LLM running at 21,000 tok/s on a $250 FPGA (Live Demo)▲79
A 3.16M-parameter INT4 transformer running entirely in the on-chip memory of a Xilinx Kria KV260. Zero DRAM in the token loop, 59,965 tok/s on the fabric, bit-exact. Chat with it live.
Aug 2026 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
15RL
Running LLMs in one line of Python without Docker▲68
Hello Hacker News! We're Yangqing, Xiang and JJ from lepton.ai. We are building a platform to run any AI models as easy as writing local code, and to get your favorite models in minutes. It's like container for AI, but without the hassle of actually building a docker image. We built and contributed to some of the world's most popular AI software - PyTorch 1.0, ONNX, Caffe, etcd, Kubernetes, etc. We also managed hundreds of thousands of computers in our previous jobs. And we found that the AI software stack is usually unnecessarily complex - and we want to change that. Imagine if you are a…
2023 · lepton.ai · its alternatives →
16
I ran a language model on a PS2▲46
The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
nCompass AI Assistant▲88
Hello HackerNews! I’m excited to share what we’ve been working on at nCompass Technologies: an AI inference* platform that gives you a scalable and reliable API to access any open-source AI model — with no rate limits. We don't have rate limits as optimizations we made to our AI model serving software enable us to support a high number of concurrent requests without degrading quality of service for you as a user. If you’re thinking, well aren’t there a bunch of these already? So were we when we started nCompass. When using other APIs, we found that they weren’t reliable enough to be able to…
Mar 2026 · ncompass.tech · its alternatives →
18
ZSE – Open-source LLM inference engine with 3.9s cold starts▲58
I've been building ZSE (Z Server Engine) for the past few weeks — an open-source LLM inference engine focused on two things nobody has fully solved together: memory efficiency and fast cold starts. The problem I was trying to solve: Running a 32B model normally requires ~64 GB VRAM. Most developers don't have that. And even when quantization helps with memory, cold starts with bitsandbytes NF4 take 2+ minutes on first load and 45–120 seconds on warm restarts — which kills serverless and autoscaling use cases. What ZSE does differently: Fits 32B in 19.3 GB VRAM (70% reduction vs FP16) — runs…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
Buildfunctions▲9
GPU Functions: Deploy AI Models & Run Serverless Inference
2024 · buildfunctions.com · its alternatives →
20
Banana.dev Serverless GPUs for Machine Learning Inference▲16
Inference hosting for AI teams who ship fast and scale faster.
2022 · banana.dev · its alternatives →
21PA
Pruna AI – Inference Optimization Engine▲6
Hello Hacker News! I am Bertrand from Pruna AI. With my associates, John, Rayan, and Stephan, we are fellow researchers in AI efficiency and reliability coming from TUM. We are building an optimization engine that combines compression methods (e.g. quantization, pruning, compilation, batching…) in the aim of saving compute power when running AI models. This optimization engine take one base model as input and returns a compressed model as output. It aims to help for two things: - Make various AI models faster and/or smaller for various hardware (because they can require significant…
2024 · its alternatives →
22
Run any Llama model finetune and more, instantly▲7
Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…
2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →
23
We Beat MLPerf: Modern Storage for KV Offload and LLM Training▲35
High performance storage engine for efficient LLM inference and GPU Training.
Sep 2026 · theopenlake.com · its alternatives →
24
Cuts Long Horizon Inference Costs by 50% via external KV Cache Offload▲22
Hey HN, we’re the developers of OpenLake, an open source storage engine for offloading LLM KV caches from GPU memory into a shared tier of RAM and NVMe. We built OpenLake because KV caches are outgrowing GPU memory. A single 256K token conversation on Gemma 4 31B produces approximately 43GB of KV state, more than half the memory of an 80GB H100. The problem becomes even harder across a cluster: a prefix cached on one GPU host is unavailable when the next request lands on a different GPU, forcing the new GPU to repeat work the fleet has already completed. Once the KV cache is offloaded,…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →