ScaleDown vs SPEV

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.

SPEV

SPEV answers typed questions over text, audio or an image in one call, with a public OpenAPI schema and Apache-2.0 weights on Hugging Face. It is a day old, has an 8,192-token context, no status page or changelog, and Sprag's terms let it train on API content unless the customer opts out by email.

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

SPEV

1. Send model: "spev" to POST https://api.sprag.ai/v1/decisions with a bearer key. /v1/systemone returns 410
2. Ask every question about one piece of evidence in one request. Answers come back in question order
3. Send audio as base64 in input_audio with format, not as a data URL, and at most one image across all messages
4. Keep evidence and questions under 8,192 tokens. Over the limit returns 400 model_limit_exceeded
5. Back off on 429 and 503 for Retry-After seconds. Limits are 60 requests a minute per organisation by default
6. Handle an answer of type refusal, which carries no probabilities