Liquid d1 vs ScaleDown

Liquid d1

The hosted API costs $0.04 per million input tokens and takes TypeSafe's System One request, and the d1-3B weights run locally through Transformers or llama.cpp. Liquid's terms allow it to train on API content, and no status page, rate limits or error reference were found. The family launched between 22 September and 7 October 2026.

ScaleDown

Classify answers Jev-shaped choice, noul and score questions with probabilities, and Extract returns values with confidences and character offsets, at $0.05 per million input tokens with output free. There is no status page, no published rate limit and no public changelog, and the site's compliance claims contradict each other.

Liquid d1

1. POST to https://api.liquid.ai/decisions/v1/systemone with a liquid_ key as a Bearer header. This is not a chat-completions endpoint
2. Use d1 for images. d1:free is text-only and answers that it does not accept images
3. Send images as Base64 data URLs in images, at most 8, with the whole JSON body under 4.5 MB. Remote image URLs are refused
4. Budget tokens per question. Each question is billed as its own prompt, with its text and every image counted again
5. Don't send confidential content to the hosted API, since the terms allow training on it. Run d1-3B locally for that data

ScaleDown

1. Send several questions about one item in one /v1/scaledown call. Each becomes its own Classify call and the usage is summed
2. Pin classify-1, extract-1 or summarize-1 once you've tuned thresholds on your own labelled cases
3. Set context_chars to 0 and use top_n on Extract unless you need the 500 characters of context each side
4. Set reasoning: false on /classify when you only need the label. The reasoning call bills its input at 2x
5. Back off and retry on 429, 502 and 504. No limits are published and calls have no side effects