Together AI Cuts Inference Costs 50% as Open-Source Competition Intensifies

Together AI has slashed inference pricing by 50% across all hosted models, responding to competitive pressure from DeepSeek's ultra-low-cost API and ongoing optimization improvements on its inference infrastructure.

The price cuts apply to all models on the platform, including Llama 4, Mistral Large 3, Qwen 2.5, and dozens of community fine-tuned variants. Llama 4 Maverick 400B inference now costs just $0.50 per million input tokens, down from $1.00.

Together AI attributes half of the cost reduction to competitive dynamics — particularly DeepSeek's disruptive pricing — and half to genuine infrastructure improvements including better GPU utilization, optimized batching, and a new speculative decoding implementation that increases throughput by 40%.

The company also introduced a new Turbo tier with lower latency guarantees for production applications, and expanded its fine-tuning service to support RLHF and DPO training methods in addition to standard supervised fine-tuning.

CEO Vipul Ved Prakash stated that the AI inference market is entering a commoditization phase, where providers must differentiate on developer experience, reliability, and ecosystem rather than raw model access.

Together AI now hosts over 150 models with a focus on rapid availability of new open-source releases. The company reported that it processes over 2 billion tokens per day and has seen API traffic grow 5x in the past year.

The pricing pressure is being felt across the industry, with Replicate, Anyscale, and Fireworks AI all announcing similar reductions in recent weeks. Analysts predict that hosted inference costs will continue to fall 30-40% annually as hardware improves and competition intensifies.