Online vs Hosted
Every Cortega product runs the same way underneath. What changes across On-Prem, SaaS, and Dedicated is who operates it and where your traffic and data sit.
Signals that point toward each option
| Signal | Leans toward |
|---|---|
| You're in a regulated industry, or your data has to stay inside infrastructure you control | On-Prem |
| You already run models locally, or already manage your own GPU/compute infrastructure | On-Prem |
| You want zero infrastructure to operate yourself | SaaS |
| You want SaaS's operational simplicity, but no infrastructure shared with anyone else | Dedicated |
| Latency matters and you want Cortega colocated with your own compute | On-Prem or Dedicated |
Most customers land on one option because two or three of these are true at once, not from a single rule.
Being occasionally rate-limited by your LLM providers doesn't belong in this table. AI Border Gateway's routing and failover handles that, regardless of where Cortega runs. See The AI governance problem.
On-Prem
Self-hosted on your own servers, optionally air-gapped. You run the containers and control upgrades and network access.
SaaS
Hosted by Cortega at Cortega's own shared platform, with your traffic kept separate from other customers as its own tenant. You see your own usage, not the underlying provider cost or which provider answered a given call.
Dedicated
Cortega deploys and runs a full private environment for you, inside your own cloud account, with its own gateways, its own database, and its own URL. No sharing with anyone else. For customers who want SaaS's operational model without shared infrastructure.
Endpoint Guard runs the same way regardless of your hosting choice
Endpoint Guard intercepts AI traffic locally, on the device, runs guardrails there, and always sends the call to the destination the user meant. It relays nothing through Cortega's infrastructure and holds no provider API key. Each guardrail can also be set to observe only instead of masking or rejecting, for the most privacy-conscious posture. If keeping your AI traffic content off Cortega's infrastructure entirely matters to you, this matters more than On-Prem vs SaaS. See Endpoint Guard.
Which one first
If you're not sure, On-Prem is the lowest-commitment way to see the product running against your own traffic before deciding whether SaaS or Dedicated fits better long-term. See Try it on your laptop.