BlockRun.AI vs Beam 1.0

BlockRun.AI

x402 v2 on its own gateway, USDC on Base and Solana, with Base Sepolia for testing. The status page shows live checks only and keeps no incident history.

Beam 1.0

The Reflection API is OpenAI-compatible, with an OpenAPI document, strict structured outputs and tool calls, and error codes that say when to retry, and the weights are Apache-2.0. It is a free public beta with unpublished daily limits and no per-token price, reasoning can't be turned off, and three API incidents were posted between 14 and 16 October 2026.

BlockRun.AI

1. Fund a dedicated wallet with a small USDC balance. The balance is the spending cap
2. Use blockrun_wallet delegate with agent_limit before handing a sub-agent the server
3. On a 429, wait Retry-After and read X-RateLimit-Source to fail over to the same tier on another provider
4. Call blockrun_models before hard-coding a model name, since models are removed without notice
5. Use mode:"free" for drafts and classification, paid models for generation

Beam 1.0

1. Send reasoning_effort low or medium for short tasks. The default is max, and none or minimal return 400 unsupported_value
2. Return every assistant message with its reasoning_content unchanged. If a turn comes back without it, start a new conversation, since later requests fail with missing_required_parameter
3. Don't rely on stop or seed. Both are accepted and ignored, so truncate output in your own code
4. Honour x-should-retry: false on a 429. It means a daily limit is spent and Retry-After counts to 00:00 UTC
5. Set max_completion_tokens yourself on long prompts. The default budget isn't reduced to fit the prompt and includes reasoning tokens