The pay-per-use API
You build something, and you pay per chunk of text processed. The API is a raw ingredient — you bring the recipe. The reward is AI wired directly into your own workflow.
AI as a raw ingredient
Instead of renting a finished product, you call the model directly through code and pay for what you use. The cost unit is a token — a chunk of text roughly three-quarters of a word. Your developer counts tokens the way a kitchen counts ingredients.
This is how businesses embed AI into customer support, document processing, and custom tools.
Right for you if…
- You have a developer (in-house or hired). This is not a no-code path.
- You need AI inside your own product or workflow, not inside someone else's app.
- Volume is real — enough that building the integration pays for itself.
Not for you if you want to plug into something ready-made, or you don't have anyone to build and maintain it.
Pennies per task, plus your build time
Per-token pricing is tiny — a single request can cost fractions of a cent. But the bill grows with volume, and the surprise is usually on the input side: long documents and big contexts burn tokens fast. Budget by expected volume, not by the sticker rate.
Vendor SLA, but you own the stack
The model vendor has a service-level agreement and is generally reliable. But you're now on the hook for your own code, your own error handling, and the API key — when something breaks, it's your team's pager.
