provider-nscale (Nscale Example (Cost-Effective AI Inference))
This example demonstrates how to use the Nscale provider with promptfoo to evaluate Nscale Serverless Inference API models, which offer cost-effective, high-performance AI inference with zero rate limits.
You can run this example with:
npx promptfoo@latest init --example provider-nscale
cd provider-nscale
Prerequisites
Authentication Setup
- Sign up for an account at Nscale
- Navigate to your account settings
- Go to "Service Tokens" section
- Generate a service token and set it as an environment variable:
export NSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN="your-service-token-here"
Alternatively, you can add it to your .env file:
NSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN=your-service-token-here
Example Configuration
This repository contains an example configuration demonstrating Nscale's capabilities:
Basic Model Evaluation (promptfooconfig.yaml)
This configuration evaluates two popular Nscale models on their ability to solve reasoning problems and generate creative content.
promptfoo eval
Expected output: You'll see a comparison of how each model handles different types of tasks, with metrics on accuracy, creativity, and response quality.
Image Generation Evaluation (image-promptfooconfig.yaml)
This configuration compares Nscale's image generation models on various prompts to evaluate their quality and consistency.
promptfoo eval -c image-promptfooconfig.yaml
Expected output: You'll see generated images from different models (Flux.1 Schnell, SDXL Lightning, Stable Diffusion XL) for comparison across various image types including landscapes, futuristic scenes, portraits, and abstract art.
Model Capabilities
Nscale supports many popular models with competitive pricing:
Text Generation Models:
openai/gpt-oss-120b- OpenAI's 120B open-weight modelopenai/gpt-oss-20b- OpenAI's 20B modelqwen/qwen-3-235b-a22b-instruct- Qwen 3 235B modelqwen/qwen-3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507- Qwen 3 235B Instruct 2507qwen/qwen-3-4b-thinking-2507- Qwen 3 4B Thinking 2507qwen/qwen-3-8b- Qwen 3 8B modelqwen/qwen-3-14b- Qwen 3 14B modelqwen/qwen-3-32b- Qwen 3 32B modelqwen/qwen-2.5-coder-3b-instruct- Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B Instructqwen/qwen-2.5-coder-7b-instruct- Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B Instructqwen/qwen-2.5-coder-32b-instruct- Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instructqwen/qwq-32b- Qwen QwQ 32B modelmeta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct- Meta's Llama 3.3 70B modelmeta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct- Meta's Llama 3.1 8B modelmeta/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct- Llama 4 Scout 17B model (Image-Text-to-Text)deepseek/deepseek-r1-distill-llama-70b- DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70Bdeepseek/deepseek-r1-distill-llama-8b- DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8Bdeepseek/deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-1.5b- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5Bdeepseek/deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-7b- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7Bdeepseek/deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-14b- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14Bdeepseek/deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-32b- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32Bmistral/devstral-small-2505- Mistral's Devstral Small modelmistral/mixtral-8x22b-instruct-v0.1- Mixtral 8x22B Instruct
Embedding Models:
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B- Qwen 3 8B Embedding model
Text-to-Image Models:
BlackForestLabs/FLUX.1-schnell- Flux.1 Schnell image generation modelstabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0- Stable Diffusion XL 1.0ByteDance/SDXL-Lightning-4step- SDXL Lightning 4-stepByteDance/SDXL-Lightning-8step- SDXL Lightning 8-step
Pricing & Usage
Nscale offers highly competitive pricing with up to 80% cost savings compared to other providers:
- Text Generation: Starting from $0.01 input / $0.03 output per 1M tokens
- Image Generation: Starting from $0.0008 per mega-pixel
- Zero rate limits and no cold starts
Check the official pricing page for the most current rates.