Together AI and denv do different jobs.

Together AI is a hosted inference API for open-weight models. You send a request, you pay for tokens, you do not run the GPU. That is a real product, and for a lot of teams it is the right one.

denv is not that product. denv does not sell per-token inference and does not resell GPUs. You deploy a model on Lambda, Nebius, AWS, Hetzner or your own servers. You pay those providers. denv charges for the cluster. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, which is why the SDK call looks similar and the bill does not.

When Together is the simpler choice

You want a model live today, you do not want to operate GPUs, and a shared or dedicated endpoint priced per token matches the traffic. denv is early. The quickstart is marked launching soon. If “this week, no cluster” is the requirement, a hosted API is the honest recommendation.

When people leave a token API

They want a checkpoint the API does not serve, weights that cannot leave their account, a GPU they already pay for, or an endpoint that can fail over across providers they chose. That is the denv job: a recipe, health checks, and one cluster.

What this page will not say

It will not claim Together lacks a feature we have not checked, and it will not quote a Together price. Their pricing page is the source for that. It will not claim denv is faster than Together. Together was not a named row in the public 23-way board we reproduced. Do not invent the row.

The decision guide is how to run LLM inference.