Used For

• +**Your beautiful prototype dies when the first real user hits it** → Auto-scales from 1 to 8 copies based on traffic, handles the load spikes
• +**You're spending more time configuring servers than building AI features** → Upload your model code, get a working endpoint in 15 minutes
• +**Your AI responses take 30 seconds because the model has to wake up** → Cold starts happen in seconds, not minutes
• +Packages models with all dependencies in "Truss" containers - no more "works on my machine" deployment hell
• +Built-in monitoring shows you exactly what's broken instead of mysterious 500 errors

Best For

• >Your self-hosted AI models keep crashing at 3am and you're tired of being the GPU babysitter
• >You want to prototype with Llama or other massive models without downloading 100GB files
• >Your startup needs AI features live this week, not next month after DevOps setup

Not For

• -Teams needing everything on their own servers - this is cloud-only, no on-premise option
• -Companies wanting full machine learning pipelines with training and data management - this only runs models, doesn't train them
• -Solo developers on tight budgets - GPU usage adds up fast even with the free tier

Pairs With

• *Zendesk (where customer service agents get AI-powered response suggestions)
• *Datadog (to get alerts when your models are burning through your budget)
• *PostgreSQL (to store conversation history and model outputs)
• *Stripe (to handle billing when you build AI features for customers)
• *Slack (where your team gets notifications about model performance and cost overruns)
• *Hugging Face (where you find the open-source models to deploy on Baseten)

The Catch

• !GPU costs hit different than regular hosting - you're paying by the minute for powerful hardware even during light usage
• !Setting max replicas is critical or a traffic spike will generate a surprise bill
• !You still need to know Python and model packaging - the "low-code" parts are just UI building, not the core deployment

Bottom Line

Deploys AI models in minutes instead of weeks, but you'll pay GPU prices even for small experiments.