--- title: Understanding Generative APIs costs description: Compare costs for the different deployment options of Scaleway Generative APIs - Serverless versus Dedicated Deployment. tags: generative-apis how-much cost charge dates: validation: 2026-05-11 posted: 2026-05-11 --- Understanding the financial impact of AI workloads is essential for making informed decisions. The Cost estimator (available via the [Scaleway console](https://console.scaleway.com/generative-api/cost-estimator)) provides a clear, side‑by‑side view of how the same generative workload behaves under the different deployment options offered by Scaleway: [Generative APIs - Serverless versus Generative APIs Dedicated Deployment](/generative-apis/faq/#what-is-the-difference-between-serverless-and-dedicated-deployment). - The Cost estimator provides an estimate based on standard benchmarks, assuming significant concurrency and a low cache hit rate. Only performance tests in production, based on your actual workload, can provide a fully accurate estimate. - Performance may vary significantly for extreme input/output ratios (e.g., 100:1 or 1:10). In these cases, processing is bottlenecked by either input-heavy or output-heavy workloads. - For dedicated deployments, caching is implicit and exclusive to each user. This can significantly improve performance for use cases with many similar input tokens, such as a long system prompt with a common prefix shared across requests, typical of extended conversations. ## Compare costs 1. Log in to the [Scaleway console](https://console.scaleway.com/). 2. Click **Generative APIs** in the **AI** section of the side menu. 3. Select the **Cost estimator** tab. 4. Model your workload by setting the following: - **Number of users** - **Queries per user per day** - **Hours of usage/day** - **Load** 5. Set your chosen **Model** and **GPU**. The estimator instantly calculates the total monthly cost for both Serverless and Dedicated modes. 6. Compare cost differences side‑by‑side.