Best LLM Serving Providers for Coding Assistants 2026
The short answer
For a coding assistant, the serving provider is chosen by three numbers: tokens per second (how fast a turn finishes), tokens per minute you are allowed (how many developers you can serve at once) and the cached-input price (agents resend the repository on every turn). As of October 9, 2026:
- Fireworks AI — best all-round: the frontier open coding models (Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash), the highest published self-serve throughput ceilings, and Fast variants for interactive turns.
- Together AI — the same models at the same list prices, a Kimi K3 promotion, and provisioned throughput with an SLA when serverless best-effort is not enough.
- Cerebras — the fastest output for small models: gpt-oss-120b at about 3,000 tokens per second.
- Groq — fast and cheapest for gpt-oss-120b, but strict base limits.
- DeepInfra — the lowest list price on Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro.
Prices below are USD per million tokens (input / cached input / output), read from each vendor’s pricing page on October 9, 2026. They are these hosts’ own rates, not the model makers’ first-party APIs: DeepSeek’s own API charges $0.15/$0.60 off-peak for V4.1 Flash, and Moonshot lists Kimi K3 at $3/$15.
The comparison
| Provider | Coding models | Price per MTok (in / cached / out) | Speed | Concurrency you get self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fireworks AI | Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, GLM 5.3 Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Qwen 3.8 Max, MiniMax M3 | GLM 5.3 $1.40 / $0.26 / $4.40 · Kimi K3 $3 / $0.30 / $15 · V4.1 Flash $0.30 / $0.006 / $1.20 · GLM 5.3 Flash $0.15 / $0.03 / $0.50 | Fast variants aim for 100+ tok/s: Kimi K3 Fast $4.50 / $22.50, GLM 5.3 Fast $2.10 / $6.60 | Adaptive: up to 2.16M generated TPM (models <600B), 432K (GLM 5.3), 216K (Kimi K3); 6,000 RPM account cap |
| Together AI | Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, GLM 5.3 Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Qwen 3.8 Max, MiniMax M3 | Same list as Fireworks; Kimi K3 promo $2.70 / $0.27 / $13.50 until Oct 11, 2026 | Best-effort serverless | No published per-model ceiling; 429/503 under load; provisioned throughput (PTUs) with SLA via sales; dedicated H100 $5.49/h, B200 $8.99/h |
| Cerebras | gpt-oss-120b, Qwen 3.8 27B (shared); more via dedicated | gpt-oss-120b $0.35 / — / $0.75 | ~3,000 tok/s (gpt-oss-120b), ~1,850 (Qwen 3.8 27B) | Developer: 1M uncached / 3M total TPM, 1,000 RPM (gpt-oss-120b) |
| Groq | gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b, Qwen 3.8 27B | gpt-oss-120b $0.15 / $0.075 / $0.60 | ~500 tok/s | Base limits 30 RPM / 8K TPM; higher on Developer plan |
| DeepInfra | Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Qwen 3.8 Max | Kimi K3 $2.85 / $0.285 / $14.25 · V4 Pro $1.30 / $0.10 / $2.60 | Standard | Pay-as-you-go; limits by account |
Picks by job
A team coding agent on frontier open models: Fireworks. It is the only provider in this group that publishes per-model throughput ceilings, and they are large enough for hundreds of concurrent sessions on the smaller models. Its Priority tier (25% more on most models) reduces 503 load-shedding during peak hours — the failure a developer actually notices.
The same models with a capacity guarantee: Together AI. Its serverless tier is explicitly best-effort; once a coding assistant is customer-facing, buy provisioned throughput or a dedicated endpoint. Together also serves the largest share of OpenRouter traffic for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (40.8%), GLM 5.3 Flash (28.2%) and Kimi K3 (23.1%) as of September 30, 2026, by its own count.
Autocomplete and inline edits: Cerebras. Latency matters more than intelligence for completions. At about 3,000 tokens per second, a 300-token edit returns in a tenth of a second. The catch is a two-model shared catalog; larger coding models need a dedicated contract.
Cheapest fast small model: Groq at $0.15 / $0.60 for gpt-oss-120b, with cached input at half price. Plan for its base limits (30 requests per minute) until you move to a paid plan.
Lowest list price on Kimi K3: DeepInfra, 5% under Fireworks and Together.
Cost per token is mostly cached input
A coding agent turn typically sends tens of thousands of tokens of repository context and gets a few thousand back, and most of that context is identical to the previous turn. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on Fireworks costs $0.30 per million uncached input tokens and $0.006 cached — 98% less. Compare providers on the cached column, and keep prompts stable (system prompt and file context first, the new instruction last) so caching works. Cerebras rewards this twice: cached tokens do not count against the uncached tokens-per-minute limit, and the total limit is 3x the uncached one.
Do not route everything to open models
The best results in 2026 come from routing: hard turns to a frontier model, routine turns to an open one. Fireworks reports its FireRouter with Opus cut cost per coding session 57% while scoring 98.1% of Claude Opus 5.5’s accuracy. See Together Link vs FireRouter vs OpenRouter for that choice, the full provider ranking in best LLM inference providers, and frontier model rates in our current API prices table.
Last verified: October 9, 2026. List prices change often; promotions noted with end dates.