Fireworks.ai serves open-weight models through a highly optimised serverless API. Strong tech, sensible pricing at low volume. Above about 50M tokens/month, a dedicated RTX 5060 Ti 16GB on our UK dedicated hosting becomes the cheaper option – especially if you need fine-tuning or data residency.
Contents
- Fireworks serverless pricing
- Break-even volumes
- Feature comparison
- When Fireworks wins
- When dedicated wins
Fireworks serverless pricing
| Model class | Blended $/M tokens | 1B tokens/month | 5060 Ti flat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7-8B (Mistral, Llama 3.1 8B) | ~$0.20 | $200 | $380 |
| 14B (Qwen 14B) | ~$0.30 | $300 | $380 |
| 70B (Llama 3.1 70B) | ~$0.90 | $900 | not on 16GB – needs 5090/6000 |
| Custom LoRA (per request) | +$0.50-1.00/M | +$500-1,000 | free on dedicated |
| Dedicated deployment (Fireworks) | From ~$2.90/hr | ~$2,100 | $380 |
Break-even volumes
Against Fireworks serverless at $0.20/M on an 8B model, the 5060 Ti at $380/month breaks even at 1.9B tokens/month. At $0.30/M for a 14B model, break-even drops to 1.27B tokens/month. With one or more LoRA adapters adding ~$0.50/M surcharge, break-even drops sharply – 545M tokens/month covers it.
- Low volume (<500M/month): Fireworks cheaper.
- Break-even zone (500M-2B): roughly equal on cost, dedicated wins on residency and predictability.
- High volume (>2B): dedicated meaningfully cheaper, and you can run 720 t/s aggregate without throttling.
Feature comparison
| Dimension | Fireworks serverless | 5060 Ti dedicated |
|---|---|---|
| Latency TTFT | 150-400ms (their FireAttention stack) | 80-180ms on LAN, ~1s first-token |
| Cost model | Per token + LoRA surcharges | Flat £300/month |
| Model swap | Their catalogue only | Any HF model that fits 16GB |
| Custom fine-tunes | Upload and pay per request | Train and serve free on-card |
| Data residency | US-first, unclear EU | UK-explicit |
| Rate limits | Per-tier quota | None |
| Cold start | Shared – often warm | Zero – always warm |
When Fireworks wins
- You are under 500M tokens/month and do not need fine-tunes.
- You want ultra-low TTFT on their optimised stack.
- You want to A/B test several model catalogue entries quickly.
- You cannot staff any inference ops.
When dedicated wins
- You are above 1B tokens/month on an 8-14B model.
- You need UK data residency for customers, regulators or your own DPIA.
- You want free embeddings + reranker + FP8 LLM co-hosted.
- You want to serve one or more custom LoRAs without per-request surcharge.
Dedicated alternative to serverless
Fixed cost, UK residency, your model choice. UK dedicated hosting.
Order the RTX 5060 Ti 16GBSee also: vs Together.ai, break-even calculator, FP8 Llama deployment, for SaaS RAG.
