How to Deploy Qwen2.5 72B with vLLM + FastAPI on a $20/Month DigitalOcean GPU Droplet: Production Inference at 1/90th Claude Cost

This article details how to deploy the Qwen2.5 72B model on a DigitalOcean GPU Droplet for just $20/month. It offers a low-cost alternative to commercial LLM APIs, promising production inference with performance competitive to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a 98% cost reduction.