Two weeks ago, I plugged an NVIDIA DGX Spark into the network, loaded Qwen2.5-32B, slapped on a proxy, and pointed a domain at it. STORM AI inference API went live.
No team. No budget. One machine. Day one, I ran 2,859 evaluation prompts through EvalScope across four models.
Result: zero structural errors, 100% success at 30 concurrent requests. Not the best hardware. Good enough.
Why another API? The market is flooded.
What's missing is determinism.
Doubao started charging. DeepSeek looks cheap—¥1/M input, ¥2/M output—but "shared instance at capacity" is the norm, not the exception. You deploy an Agent. It runs fine at 2 PM. At 3 AM it hits 429. You wake up to a log
full of retries. The cheap price tag hides the real cost: your time.
OpenAI GPT-4o-mini at $0.60/M output. Claude at $15/M. Looks reasonable until your Agent burns through twenty bucks a day during development. Trial and error at scale isn't free.
I'm not saying STORM is better. I'm saying there's a use case being ignored: inference built for Agents, not chatbots.
Chatbots forgive failure. One retry, nobody cares. Agents chain calls: A's output feeds B's input, B's output triggers C's tool selection. One random fluctuation anywhere in that chain, and the whole thing collapses.
You don't need the smartest model. You need the same output for the same input, every time.
That's why STORM defaults to temperature=0. Not because we hate creativity. Because Agents don't need it. They need reliability.
Numbers don't lie
EvalScope head-to-head:
| | Success Rate | Avg Latency | Output Throughput |
|------------------|--------------|-------------|-------------------|
| STORM (DGX, 32B) | 100% | 24s | 307 tok/s |
| DeepSeek V3 | 100% | 4s | 980 tok/s |
| Kimi | 96% | 6s | 520 tok/s |
| Mac M4 (14B) | 100% | 73s | 45 tok/s |
DeepSeek is faster. Nobody disputes that. But that speed is shared-pool speed, not your speed. STORM is slower, but those 307 tok/s are yours alone—no noisy neighbors, no sudden rate limits, no "sorry, high traffic." The DGX sits in Nanjing. Its compute budget is finite. What's allocated to you stays allocated to you.
Free trial. No strings.
100,000 free tokens. No credit card. No signup form. Point your Agent at it and see if it holds up. If it works for you, paid plans start at $3.90/month for 500K tokens.
Pricing: https://api.stormengine.cloud
Benchmarks: https://api.stormengine.cloud/static/bench_report.html
API docs: right on the landing page
If something's broken, tell me. I'll fix it.
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