Closed models — the frontier Gemini, GPT, and Claude tiers — are served by their owners. You send a request and pay per token or per call. They are often the most capable, but you cannot self-host them, your data leaves your premises, and pricing or availability can change under you.
The book · Volume 7 of 7
AI for Video: A Complete Guide to Intelligence in Video Products: From Real-Time Pipelines and Agents to Serving, Cost, Compliance, and Verticals
A closed model gets you frontier quality with no infrastructure, while pricing, data residency and availability stay in someone else's hands. Volume 7 covers this trade-off in detail: serving and infrastructure with vLLM and Triton, cost per stream-hour and EU AI Act requirements, so you can decide when a closed model is the right call. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Weighing a closed model API against self-hosting for your video AI features?
We will model both options for your volumes and send a comparison with cost per stream-hour, latency and data residency. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
