Microsoft-Decision-1 vs ScaleDown

Microsoft-Decision-1

Microsoft publishes $0.042 per million input tokens, with output free, and the model is callable through Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter. It is in public preview. No licence, model-specific retention statement, rate limit or deprecation policy was found, and the Foundry route needs an Azure deployment and an Entra token. Latency and accuracy figures are Microsoft's claims.

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.

Microsoft-Decision-1

1. Use OpenRouter's Decisions method, not an OpenAI chat-completions SDK. OpenRouter says chat completions SDKs will not work with this model
2. On Foundry, send the request to the deployment's /providers/microsoft/v1/systemone path with a Microsoft Entra token for https://cognitiveservices.azure.com/.default, not an API key
3. Take the deployment name from the Foundry quickstart before the first call. Microsoft says to confirm the route and authentication header, and the pages reviewed do not give the name
4. Keep each request within OpenRouter's 32,768-token context and send only fixed options, since the model is not intended for open-ended generation
5. Measure latency and calibration on your own labelled cases before relying on Microsoft's latency and 'nine times out of 10' statements

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