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ForgeStack vs Amazon Bedrock
Both keep your AI on AWS. Bedrock gives you managed access to AWS’s model catalog, billed per token. ForgeStack self-hosts an open-source LLM on your own EC2 node, billed per hour, with RAG and a chat API already wired up. Here’s how to choose.
| Amazon Bedrock | ForgeStack | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A managed AWS service for calling foundation models through an API | A tool that deploys an open-weight model, RAG and a chat API onto EC2 in your AWS account |
| Models | AWS's catalog, including proprietary frontier models | Open-weight models from the Hugging Face Hub (Qwen, Llama-based, Mistral, Phi, Granite and any GGUF) |
| Where the model runs | AWS-managed infrastructure | A dedicated EC2 instance in your account and region |
| Pricing | Per token (or provisioned throughput) | Per instance hour, paid to AWS. From a few dollars a month on CPU; no per-token fees |
| RAG | Knowledge Bases for Bedrock, configured separately | Built in: upload or sync documents, answers cite sources |
| Fine-tuning | Supported for selected models | LoRA on your own Q/A pairs, on the same node |
| Infrastructure as code | You write it | A generated CloudFormation template you can download and re-run without ForgeStack |
| Best for | The strongest models, elastic scale, minimal ops | Predictable cost, open models, data stored in your own account |
Choose Bedrock when
- You need frontier-class quality that small open models can’t match.
- Traffic is spiky or low, so paying per token beats an always-on instance.
- You want AWS to run everything, including scaling.
Choose ForgeStack when
- You want a specific open-weight model, or one you’ve fine-tuned.
- You want a flat monthly cost instead of per-token billing.
- Your security review wants the model, documents and logs stored in your own account.
- You want a RAG chatbot API with human handoff without building it.
Be honest about the trade-offs
Small open models are less capable than the largest proprietary ones, and an always-on node costs money even when idle. ForgeStack is an early product without SOC 2, and API requests pass through its control plane on the way to your stack. Many teams use both: Bedrock for hard reasoning, a self-hosted model for private, high-volume or document-grounded work.
Browse the models and their AWS cost.
Deploy it into your own AWS account
Free to prototype. You pay AWS directly, and the CloudFormation template is yours to keep.