A Fireworks alternative that is actually self-host.

Fireworks AI serves open models behind an API. Search results for “Fireworks alternative” often end at “just run vLLM yourself.” That advice is true and incomplete. Running vLLM is the engine. Production is the recipe, the GPU, the router, and the person who gets paged when a GPU falls off the bus.

denv is that layer. vLLM hosting or SGLang, pinned per GPU type, on a cluster you can kubectl. Auto-repair and multi-provider failover are part of it. You pay the GPU provider directly. denv does not sell per-token inference, so it is a poor “cheaper Fireworks” if what you wanted was a lower token price and zero machines.

Stay on a hosted API if

Traffic is uneven, you have no one to own a cluster, or the model you need is already served well. Fireworks’ own docs are the place to confirm what they serve today. This page will not recite a feature matrix from memory.

Self-host if

The weights, the account boundary, or a GPU you already bought are the constraint. Start with the inference guide, then a recipe. The public speed evidence denv will stand behind is the H100 Qwen work, not a head-to-head against Fireworks. We have not published one.

denv is early. Write to anup@denv.ai rather than assuming a model is in the catalog.