# Provisioned throughput

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/provisioned-throughput

> Provisioned throughput is the LLM-cloud pricing tier where you reserve guaranteed capacity (tokens/s) for a fixed price — AWS Bedrock Provisioned Throughput, Azure OpenAI PTU, Anthropic enterprise commits. Trades cost-flexibility for performance + latency guarantees.

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Provisioned throughput is the LLM-cloud pricing tier where you reserve guaranteed capacity (tokens/s) for a fixed price — AWS Bedrock Provisioned Throughput, Azure OpenAI PTU, Anthropic enterprise commits. Trades cost-flexibility for performance + latency guarantees.

On-demand LLM pricing (per-token billing) is cheap to start but suffers rate-limit + queue-time spikes under load. Provisioned throughput flips this: pay upfront for N tokens/s of dedicated capacity, get guaranteed latency + no rate limits. AWS Bedrock PT, Azure OpenAI PTU, Anthropic enterprise commits all offer this. Production patterns: use on-demand for variable workloads (chat traffic), provisioned for predictable / latency-critical workloads (high-volume agents, voice apps, real-time UX). Trade-offs: PT is expensive — break-even is usually around 30-50% utilization; provisioning too much wastes money; too little falls back to rate-limit pain. Sometimes both: PT covers baseline, on-demand handles peaks.

## When to use

- Latency-critical apps (voice agents, real-time chat).
- High-volume predictable workloads.

## Common mistakes

- Provisioning peak capacity 24/7 — wastes money.
- No fallback for PT outage — single point of failure.

## Related terms

- [managed-service](https://promtable.com/glossary/managed-service)
- [rate-limit](https://promtable.com/glossary/rate-limit)
- [llm-gateway](https://promtable.com/glossary/llm-gateway)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/provisioned-throughput
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