Drex 1.5 vs ScaleDown

Drex 1.5

The hosted endpoint has a public OpenAPI document, published limits and pinned model versions, at $0.05 per million input tokens with no output charge. The #1 under 10B claim rests on Nace's own run, since Drex is absent from both public boards. Weights carry Open RAIL-M, which requires a commercial licence above $1 million in revenue or funding.

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.

Drex 1.5

1. Call https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone with Authorization: Bearer nace_sk_..., and pin model drex-v1.5 rather than drex-latest in production.
2. Stop on 402 insufficient_credit or 402 payment_required until credit is topped up or the unpaid invoice is paid.
3. Retry 429 and 529 after retry-after-ms. On a 422 for an unknown model, use one of the ids the error message lists.
4. Keep state below 131,072 tokens and the body below 1,048,576 bytes, and send at most 512 questions per request.
5. Keep the key on a server. A key in browser code is exposed, and the /v1 routes send no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.
6. Check usage.input_tokens and the usage CSV after retries, since /v1/systemone documents no idempotency key.

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