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How could their API possibly cost $20-$30 per call? How could that even be a business model? Clearly, I am missing something here.


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25 bucks a month for 10k api calls? seems pricy

Also unless they significantly change their pricing model, we're talking about 0.5$ per API call at current prices

Sorry, I meant the price it sets for the api calls. The article calls out $10/1000 so the current price is a penny per call. I’m interested in how they set that rate.

What? Some of the APIs I use at work cost $100+ per call. (it's not really about the call, it's about the data it provides)

$10,000 per API call...

The cost per question seems super high. I can't even think of an API where a single call would cost $1cent. You better have a good pricing model to follow up on this.

Is there any good reads wrt the blowback on cost of the API? I've only read that it costs $0.25 per 1000 calls which seems relatively cheap, but I haven't looked into how it affects use cases.

Only ~$1.00 per API call...

Something isn't well thought-out here. The pricing? The usage?

$49 per month for one million records, one million calls over the API and only 20(!) sessions. I don't think there's a consumer or business app that I could build that would stay under the session and call limits.


Why aren't we charging $0.2 per 1k API calls plus $0.5 per privileged calls? Where are my revenue share programs? You guys are leaving so much on the table!

uh, try $1 per 10,000 API calls and maybe you're on to something.

Seems like people are missing the point of the question. Saying $1 is too expensive for 1000 calls without knowing what that API call does shows you're thinking in terms of value, not in terms of a pricing model that is favorable. The OP hasn't told us if he's doing ML calculations, spinning up machines, painting a Tesla, selling an airplane ticket or what. Think in terms of the pricing model only. Yes it would be nice to know what the service does, but the OP probably can't give that away.

> ~15 million API calls per day

Isn't that horrifically expensive?


Aren't they just providing access to their service? Different companies provide different billing methods and that's fine!

For example you could pay $20/month for ChatGPT and use it as much or little as you like, or pay $/per API call... But not every company needs to offer both.


> I have no idea if they prorate charges if you use less than 1000 calls so lets assume they don't, so the minimum daily cost for a user is $0.24.

The way these things work nearly everywhere is that $0.24 for 1000 API calls means your cost in a given billing period for N API calls during a billing period is 0.24 ?N/1000? or 0.24 N/1000. The first is if they do not prorate, the second is if they do.

If it takes on average 345 requests per day per user, that would be 10 500 per month per user, which would be $2.64 per month per user if they do not prorate and $2.52 per month per user if they do prorate.


There are per-API-call charges. It's just not per-byte.

Who do you charge for the API calls?

Yeah, every time I see that number trotted out I’m just like “and the point is…?”

If there’s an issue with the cost to process that many calls I’m much more suspicious of inefficiency on the API side than the client. Those numbers seem very reasonable.


The pricing model doesn't scale realistically and would require a subscription service for users. An app with 1M+ installs could do 1M+ calls per day making this service $24k / month.
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