reference/inference-provider-capabilities.md

Inference-provider capabilities — tools & structured output

A snapshot of which Hugging Face Inference Providers expose tool calling and structured output (server-side JSON-schema / response_format enforcement) for each model, with pricing and context length. Complements models.json (identity only) by recording per-(model, provider) capabilities — the thing that actually decides whether a given route can run an agentic or JSON-constrained experiment.

Source: Hugging Face — Inference Providers catalog, https://huggingface.co/inference/models (author: Hugging Face). Data pulled from the catalog's backing endpoint https://router.huggingface.co/v1/models. Snapshot retrieved: 2026-07-27. Rows: 285 live (model, provider) pairs across 129 models and 13 providers.

⚠️ Snapshot, not live. These booleans and prices change as providers come and go. If this snapshot is more than 7 days old, re-pull before relying on it — see "Refreshing" below. The retrieved field on every JSONL record carries the snapshot date so staleness is self-evident.

Data — inference-provider-capabilities.jsonl

Newline-delimited JSON, one record per live (model, provider) pair, with full provenance on each record (HF-ready per the repo's dataset convention).

field	meaning
model	HF model id, e.g. zai-org/GLM-5.2
owned_by	model owner/org
provider	inference provider serving it, e.g. deepinfra
context_length	context window in tokens (null if the provider didn't report one)
input_price_per_mtok / output_price_per_mtok	USD per 1M tokens (null if unpriced)
supports_tools	provider supports function/tool calling
supports_structured_output	provider enforces structured output (JSON schema / response_format)
is_model_author	provider is the model's first-party host
retrieved	snapshot date (source of truth for staleness)
source / endpoint	provenance URLs

Only status: "live" rows are kept — one record per live (model, provider) pair. Live-but-capability-less rows are kept as-is (featherless-ai reports no tools and no structured output on every model it serves, and that "serves it, can't do tools" fact is exactly what a route-picking consumer needs to see).

What the snapshot shows

Both tools + structured output: 83 provider rows across 54 models. Tools-only (function calling but no enforced structured output): 93 rows.

Provider capability profile

Provider	live rows	tools	tools + structured output
deepinfra	50	46	31
novita	59	44	14
together	22	17	13
nscale	17	10	8
scaleway	9	9	7
ovhcloud	7	6	6
publicai	9	5	4
zai-org	17	14	0
fireworks-ai	12	12	0
cohere	12	6	0
groq	4	4	0
cerebras	3	3	0
featherless-ai	64	0	0

Reading it: deepinfra is the widest-coverage route that supports both, and the cheapest on most models; together, scaleway, nscale, ovhcloud also support both broadly. fireworks-ai, zai-org, groq, cerebras, and cohere are effectively tools-only — they never expose structured output in this snapshot. So whether a model "supports both" often depends on which provider you route to, not the model itself.

Notable capability gaps

• moonshotai/Kimi-K3 is new in this snapshot (absent on 2026-07-18, when the only route to K3 was Moonshot's own API): one provider, together, with both tools and structured output — 1M context, $3 / $15 per 1M tokens, the priciest open route in the catalog.
• zai-org/GLM-4.7 (and GLM-4.7-Flash) is tools-only on every provider that serves it — no structured-output route exists. (deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash, tools-only-everywhere in the 2026-07-05 snapshot, has since gained structured output on deepinfra — capability drift in action.)
• The older MiniMax M-series (M1-80k/M2/M2.1) is tools-only (novita); MiniMax-M3 gains structured output on together. Kimi K2.x structured-output routes vary by version: K2.6 on deepinfra/together (it gained deepinfra since 2026-07-18), K2.7-Code on deepinfra/novita/together, K2-Instruct tools-only.
• thinkingmachines/Inkling moved hosts between snapshots: on 2026-07-18 together served it with tools + structured output; on 2026-07-27 together reports neither, and a new deepinfra route carries tools (no structured output). Capability drift on a model this repo actively measures — see the caveat below.
• XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.5-Pro flipped from no-tools to tools + structured output on deepinfra, and Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B lost its deepinfra route entirely (only scaleway still serves it with tools).
• Same model, different capability by provider remains common — whether a model "supports both" often depends on which provider you route to, not the model itself.

⚠️ Capability drift is real and fast. Between the 2026-07-18 and 2026-07-27 pulls, 10 (model, provider) pairs appeared, 7 disappeared, and 24 flipped a capability boolean — on a catalog of ~285 rows. (Two of those additions, MiniMax-M2.5/M2.7 on deepinfra, showed up between two pulls minutes apart on 2026-07-27.) Any experiment that pinned a serving host from an older snapshot should re-verify the pin still exists before trusting a re-run.

Cheapest "both" routes (illustrative)

Model	Cheapest both-capable provider	Context	$ In / Out (1M)
Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507	nscale	262K	0.01 / 0.03
Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507	nscale	262K	0.01 / 0.03
openai/gpt-oss-20b	deepinfra	131K	0.03 / 0.14
openai/gpt-oss-120b	deepinfra	131K	0.037 / 0.17
google/gemma-3-12b-it	deepinfra	131K	0.05 / 0.15

Refreshing

Re-pull whenever the snapshot is older than ~7 days (or a provider/model you care about changed). The generator is checked in next to the data — refresh-capabilities.py (no API key needed; the catalog endpoint is public):

cd reference
python refresh-capabilities.py --diff --summary     # pull, rewrite the JSONL, report drift + the .md numbers
python refresh-capabilities.py --dry-run --diff     # look before you leap: report only, write nothing

It keeps only status: "live" rows, flattens each providers[] entry to one record, stamps retrieved with the pull date, rounds prices, and writes the file in its frozen field order sorted by model then provider — so a re-pull produces a clean diff. --diff lists every (model, provider) pair added, removed, or capability-flipped since the committed snapshot; --summary recomputes the hand-maintained numbers above (row/model counts, the provider table, the cheapest-routes table) to paste in. The .md prose is not auto-generated — update the snapshot date, the counts, the provider table, the notable-gaps bullets, and the cheapest-routes table by hand from that output.