Beam 1.0 vs RouterPlus

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 It is a free public beta with unpublished daily limits and no per-token price, reasoning can't be turned off, and three API incidents were posted between 14 and 16 October 2026.

RouterPlus

The docs are written for agents, every model price is public, and each response carries its own cost. No terms of service, privacy policy, status page or changelog were found. Signup adds no free credit, and the chat catalogue is Claude and GPT only.

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

RouterPlus

1. Send max_tokens on every request. Without it the balance hold assumes up to 32,768 output tokens and can return insufficient_quota on a small balance
2. Switch on error_type. Retry rate_limit after retry-after, and stop on insufficient_quota, which needs a person to add credit or raise a cap
3. Don't add a retry loop on top of the SDK's. There is no idempotency key, so a retry that reaches a provider is billed again
4. Copy model ids from GET /v1/models or /api/models.json. An unknown id is a 404 and the gateway never substitutes one
5. Use /v1/messages for Claude when you need thinking or server tools, and /v1/chat/completions with response_format only for GPT ids