Cerebras

Developer Tools

Cerebras

FreemiumAPI

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Wafer-Scale Engine inference cloud often benchmarked as the world's fastest — an OpenAI-compatible API serving open models like Llama, Qwen and DeepSeek, with $5 free credits and pay-as-you-go pricing

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Our Verdict

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The fastest way to run open models when latency is the product

Cerebras made a bet almost nobody else took seriously: instead of stitching together thousands of GPUs, build one chip the size of a dinner plate. That Wafer-Scale Engine is why Cerebras Inference routinely tops public speed leaderboards, generating tokens for open models like Llama and Qwen many times faster than GPU clouds. For most CRUD apps that speed is a nice-to-have, but for a whole class of products — real-time voice agents, interactive reasoning, anything where a user is watching text appear — it is the difference between magic and frustration. The API speaks OpenAI, so trying it is a one-line change, and pricing is honest pay-as-you-go with $5 of free credits to benchmark first. The honest caveats: this is a home for open models, not frontier proprietary ones, and the supported catalog is narrower than a broad aggregator's. If your workload is batch processing where throughput-per-dollar matters more than first-token latency, cheaper options exist. But if speed is a feature your users can feel, Cerebras is the one to beat — and right now it usually wins.

Best for

•Teams building real-time voice or agent products on open models
•Developers who need the lowest possible time-to-first-token
•Anyone benchmarking inference speed before committing to a provider

Consider alternatives if

•You need frontier proprietary models above all (→ OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini)
•You want the widest open-model catalog at the lowest batch cost (→ Together AI / OpenRouter)

Try Cerebras

Supported Platforms

Web AppAPI

Available platforms include Web App and API.

Key Features

Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) inference — often benchmarked as the world's fastest, ~20x faster than GPU clouds

OpenAI-compatible API for open models: Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek and more

Self-serve Developer tier with pay-as-you-go token pricing and generous rate limits

Dedicated endpoints for production capacity when you need guaranteed throughput

Sub-second time-to-first-token that makes real-time agents and voice feel instant

$5 in free credits on signup to benchmark speed before committing

Pricing

free

New accounts get $5 in free credits and access to all Cerebras-powered models with rate limits, enough to benchmark the speed before paying.

paid

Pay-as-you-go token pricing — roughly $0.10 per million tokens for Llama 3.1 8B and about $0.60 per million input/output tokens for Llama 70B-class models; a self-serve Developer tier raises rate limits, and dedicated endpoints are quoted for production capacity. (Verified against the official pricing page, 2026-07-28.)

Use Cases

Real-time agents and voice apps where every millisecond of latency is felt

High-throughput reasoning chains that would be too slow on GPU inference

Serving open models like Llama and Qwen at the fastest available speed

Prototyping latency-sensitive features on free credits before scaling

Pros

Genuinely category-leading inference speed backed by custom wafer-scale silicon

OpenAI-compatible API means migration is often a one-line base-URL change

Transparent per-token pricing that is competitive with GPU inference clouds

Free credits and a self-serve tier make it easy to benchmark before buying

Cons

Catalog is focused on open models — no proprietary frontier model of its own

Fewer supported models than broad aggregators like Together or OpenRouter

Peak speed advantage matters most for latency-bound apps, less for batch jobs

Dedicated production capacity requires talking to sales rather than pure self-serve

Latest Update

2026: Cerebras continues to top public inference-speed leaderboards for open models, expanding its hosted catalog (Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek) and pushing its self-serve Developer tier and dedicated endpoints for production teams that need guaranteed throughput.