---
title: "Augure vs Northern Inference: own models or routed models"
description: "Augure vs Northern Inference: Augure serves its own models in Canada and the EU, Northern Inference routes to cloud models at cost. Migration guide included."
competitor: "Northern Inference"
vendor: "Northern Inference"
category: "canadian"
canonical: "https://augureai.ca/compare/northern-inference"
updated: "2026-10-27"
summary: "Augure runs its own reasoning models on Canadian infrastructure and vetted EU partners with never-US routing, while Northern Inference is an Ontario routing gateway that routes to cloud-hosted models at the upstream rate, with Canadian cloud regions on one tier and US and global providers on another."
faqs:
  - q: "What is Northern Inference?"
    a: "Per its terms of service, Northern Inference Inc. of Ontario is an LLM API routing gateway, not a model provider. It exposes OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible endpoints at https://northerninference.ca/v1 and routes each request to AWS Bedrock, Azure, Google Vertex or a provider API. Tier 3 routes stay in Canadian cloud regions; Tier 4 routes may run in the United States or elsewhere."
  - q: "Is Northern Inference cheaper than Augure?"
    a: "Northern Inference charges the upstream provider's USD rate with no per-token markup, plus a 9% fee on credit purchases and a currency buffer when credits are converted to CAD. Its Canadian Tier 3 chat routes range from US$0.17 to US$4.60 input per million tokens as of October 2026. Augure's models are C$0.60 to C$3.00 input per million tokens, fixed in CAD."
  - q: "How do I switch from Northern Inference to Augure?"
    a: "Both are OpenAI-compatible, so change base_url to https://api.augureai.ca/v1, swap your ni_live_ key for an Augure key, and replace route ids such as gpt-4.1-mini-t3 or claude-sonnet-4-6-t4 with ossington-5, rosedale-1 or tofino-3. Augure has no Anthropic-style /v1/messages endpoint, so Anthropic SDK code moves to the OpenAI SDK."
---

# Augure vs Northern Inference: own models or routed models

Augure and Northern Inference both sell an OpenAI-compatible API from a Canadian company, and both talk about sovereignty. They mean different things by it. Augure serves its own models on Canadian infrastructure and with vetted EU partners, never US providers. Northern Inference, per its published terms, is a routing gateway: it forwards your request to AWS Bedrock, Azure, Google Vertex or a vendor API and labels each route with its jurisdiction. Read this to choose between a Canadian-built model and a Canadian front door to global models.

## At a glance

| | Augure | Northern Inference |
|---|---|---|
| Company and jurisdiction | Canadian company, no US parent or investors. | Northern Inference Inc., Ontario, Canada, per its terms and privacy policy. |
| What it is | Model provider. | "An LLM API routing gateway. We are not the model provider." |
| Where customer data is stored | Canada. | Account and usage data in AWS Canada (ca-central-1). Prompts not stored by default. |
| Where inference runs | Canadian infrastructure (Ontario) and vetted EU partners under zero-data-retention; never US providers. | Tier 3: AWS Bedrock ca-central-1 or Azure Canada East. Tier 4: the provider's region, which "may be outside Canada", including US regions. Tiers 1 and 2 (own hardware) marked "Coming soon". |
| Your data used for training | Never. | "Northern Inference does not use your content to train or fine-tune any model." Provider policies are disclosed per route. |
| Canadian residency option | Storage always in Canada. Accounts can be set Canada-only: requests then stay in Canada or fail with `503 residency_unavailable`, never served elsewhere. tofino-3 and the Augure Open models never leave Canada. | Choose a `-t3` route id; keys can be restricted to tiers. A route that resolves to the wrong jurisdiction is refused rather than rerouted. |
| API | OpenAI-compatible, https://api.augureai.ca/v1 | OpenAI-compatible `/v1/chat/completions` and `/v1/responses`, plus Anthropic-compatible `/v1/messages`, at https://northerninference.ca/v1. Keys prefixed `ni_live_`. |
| Models | ossington-5 (256K), rosedale-1 (up to 1M), tofino-3, Augure Open (GLM-5.3, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next) | 46 routes as of October 2026: 10 Canadian Tier 3 (gpt-4.1-mini, Llama 3, Mistral, Mixtral, embeddings, rerank) and 36 global Tier 4 (Claude, GPT-6 family, Gemma, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, Nova and others). |
| Certifications | SOC 2 and ISO 27001 in progress (readiness underway with Vanta, per https://augureai.ca/security). TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest. | "We're not SOC 2 Type II certified yet." Cites AWS SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS attestations as provider assurances. ITSG-33 PBMM mapping "underway". |
| Languages | English and Quebec French natively. | English site with a French version and French docs. No language claim for the models themselves. |
| Billing currency | CAD, fixed per-model rates. | Credits in CAD, converted from USD rates at metering time with a buffer. 0% per-token markup, 9% fee on credit purchases, no minimums, credits do not expire. |
| Best fit | Teams that want a Canadian-built model, long context and bilingual work with account-level residency. | Teams that want frontier models through one Canadian key with per-route jurisdiction records, or dedicated GPU rental. |

## Where Northern Inference wins

- **Frontier model choice.** One key reaches Claude Opus and Sonnet 4.6, the GPT-6 family, Gemma, Grok, DeepSeek and Kimi, each labelled CA, US or MIXED. Augure's catalogue is its own models plus two open-weight previews.
- **Cost-plus pricing.** Its terms commit to no per-token fee above the upstream rate; the pricing page lists US$0.484 input and US$1.936 output per million tokens for gpt-4.1-mini on the Canadian tier. Augure's CAD rates are higher per token than its cheapest Canadian routes, such as Mistral 7B at US$0.17 and US$0.23.
- **Anthropic-native endpoint.** `/v1/messages` means Claude Code and the Anthropic SDK work without a shim. Augure is OpenAI-compatible only.
- **Per-request custody evidence.** Every response carries `x-ni-resolved-region`, `x-ni-resolved-jurisdiction` and `x-ni-custody-path`, and each route has a dated data-use page sourced from provider documentation. Augure returns `_augure.inference_region` and `fallback`, which is less detail.
- **Dedicated GPUs and more.** It quotes dedicated B200 and MI355X hosting about eight weeks from deposit (B300 about twenty), lists hosted Qwen3.8-27B, GLM-5.3-Flash and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash plans on Canadian-owned GPUs from C$1,500 and C$5,000 a month as a launch offer not yet open for payment, offers Tier 3 embeddings and rerank, and publishes guides for Cursor, Zed, Codex, LibreChat and Open WebUI.

## Where Augure wins

- **Never a US provider in the path.** Augure's inference runs on Canadian infrastructure and with vetted EU partners under zero-data-retention agreements. Northern Inference's Canadian tier runs in AWS and Azure Canadian regions, which its trust page says is "distinct from Canadian ownership of the underlying cloud provider", and its Tier 4 routes may run in the US. Its own-hardware tiers are not yet live.
- **Models built for Canadian work.** ossington-5, rosedale-1 and tofino-3 are built for Canadian law and Quebec French. rosedale-1 accepts up to 1M tokens; Northern Inference's Canadian chat routes top out at 300K and several are 8K or 32K.
- **Residency enforced per account, not per model id.** A Canada-only Augure account fails with `503 residency_unavailable` rather than serving elsewhere. On Northern Inference, residency depends on choosing a `-t3` route and restricting keys to tiers.
- **Stable CAD pricing.** Augure's rates are fixed in CAD per model. Northern Inference converts USD upstream rates at metering time with a buffer it sets.
- **Gateway-side documents.** Augure reads PDFs and spreadsheets on the gateway, with OCR for scans. Northern Inference's docs cover images but not PDF input.

## Switch from Northern Inference to Augure

1. **Create a key** at https://augureai.ca/developers, add a payment method, and export the key as `AUGURE_API_KEY`.
2. **Change the base URL and key.** For `/v1/chat/completions` the client constructor is the only change. Calls to `/v1/messages` with the Anthropic SDK move to the OpenAI SDK: Augure has no Anthropic-style endpoint.
3. **Map route ids.** Northern Inference ids carry a `-t3` or `-t4` suffix; Augure ids do not. OpenAI alias ids such as `gpt-4o-mini` are also accepted.

| Northern Inference route | Augure model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| `gpt-4.1-mini-t3` | `tofino-3` | Fast light tier, served in Canada with no failover outside Canada. |
| `llama3-70b-instruct-t3`, `mistral-large-2402-t3`, `mixtral-8x7b-instruct-t3` | `ossington-5` | General reasoning, 256K context, thinking can be turned off. |
| `llama3-8b-instruct-t3`, `mistral-7b-instruct-t3` | `tofino-3` | Extraction, classification, short chat. |
| `claude-sonnet-4-6-t4`, `claude-opus-4-6-t4` (agent loops) | `rosedale-1` | Reliable tool calling and up to 1M context. |
| `gpt-6-sol-t4`, `gpt-6.1-sol-t4`, `kimi-k3-t4` | `ossington-5` | Flagship reasoning and code. |
| `text-embedding-3-small-t3`, `titan-embed-text-t3`, `rerank-t3` | none | Augure's published API has no embeddings or rerank endpoint. Keep these elsewhere. |

4. **Before and after** (Python, OpenAI SDK):

```python
# Before: Northern Inference
import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://northerninference.ca/v1", api_key=os.environ["NI_API_KEY"])
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4.1-mini-t3",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise this contract in two lines."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

# After: Augure
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.augureai.ca/v1", api_key=os.environ["AUGURE_API_KEY"])
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="ossington-5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise this contract in two lines."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)
print(resp.model_extra["_augure"]["inference_region"])
```

5. **Re-check:** read `_augure.inference_region` and `fallback` instead of `x-ni-resolved-region`; omit `max_tokens` on reasoning models (cap 32,768; tofino-3 16,384); `reasoning_effort: "none"` works on ossington-5 and is served as `low` on rosedale-1; `response_format` is not combined with `tools` on reasoning models; streaming errors arrive inside the stream; the default limit is 60 requests per minute with a C$25 daily spend cap until the first charge.
6. **Run both for a week** on your own prompts, then cut over.

## Keep Northern Inference if

- You depend on a specific frontier model and a Canadian billing and custody layer is enough.
- You need Anthropic-native `/v1/messages`, or embeddings and rerank in a Canadian cloud region from the same key.
- You want to rent dedicated B200, MI355X or B300 capacity in Canada.

## Sources

- https://northerninference.ca/ (checked 2026-10-27): tiers, "Canadian-owned GPUs" plans from C$1,500 and C$5,000 per month, 9% service fee, no minimums, AWS attestations, ITSG-33 PBMM mapping underway.
- https://northerninference.ca/terms.html (checked 2026-10-27): "LLM API routing gateway", "not the model provider", 0% markup, 9% fee, CAD credits, USD conversion with buffer, prompts not stored by default, Ontario law.
- https://northerninference.ca/privacy.html (checked 2026-10-27, last updated 2026-10-26): Northern Inference Inc., Ontario; data in AWS ca-central-1; no training; Tier 4 outside Canada; sub-processors.
- https://northerninference.ca/pricing.html (checked 2026-10-27): per-route USD rates, CA and MIXED and US residency labels.
- https://northerninference.ca/api/billing/models (checked 2026-10-27): 46 routes, 10 Tier 3 Canadian routes with context windows and capabilities.
- https://northerninference.ca/docs/ (checked 2026-10-27): base URL, `ni_live_` keys, tier selection by route id, no privacy switch in the request, custody records, French docs link.
- https://northerninference.ca/docs/curl.html (checked 2026-10-27): streaming, custody response headers, error codes.
- https://northerninference.ca/docs/vision-and-capabilities.html (checked 2026-10-27): image passthrough on vision routes, `supports_function_calling`, `reasoning_effort`.
- https://northerninference.ca/trust.html (checked 2026-10-27): provider assurances "not certifications of Northern Inference", residency "distinct from Canadian ownership of the underlying cloud provider", per-route disclosures.
- https://northerninference.ca/security.html (checked 2026-10-27): "not SOC 2 Type II certified yet", fail-closed residency guard, custody headers.
- https://northerninference.ca/dedicated-hosting/ (checked 2026-10-27): B200, MI355X and B300 lead times, custom quotes.
- https://northerninference.ca/models/ (checked 2026-10-27): route catalogue, `-t3` and `-t4` suffixes, Anthropic-native model ids.