Decoding LLM Inference Economics: Real-World TTFT & Throughput Benchmarks Across Hosted APIs

When architecting production LLM systems, engineers spend weeks fine-tuning prompts, evaluating embedding strategies, and optimizing RAG pipelines. Yet, many treat the hosted inference endpoint as a black-box utility: you send an HTTP POST request, and tokens trickle back.

This abstraction is dangerous.

Recent empirical data from NeuBench speed testing reveals token throughput variances of up to 40% across major hosted LLM providers for the exact same model weights.…