ScaleDown vs kettei

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.

kettei

OneHot returns probabilities for up to 128 typed questions a call at $0.02 to $0.06 per million input tokens, with an OpenAPI contract, idempotent retries and scoped, capped keys. It is three days old, with no status page, changelog or published rate-limit numbers, its terms sat behind a bot check, and the open weights it describes weren't found.

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

kettei

1. Send context and decisions to POST https://api.sqwish.ai/v1/decide with a bearer key. Leaving out model gets kettei-core, which reads text only
2. Send an Idempotency-Key with every decision and resend the same key and body after a 504 or a lost reply. Replays aren't charged
3. Branch on error.code and error.retryable, not the status. Wait for Retry-After on 429 and retryable 503s
4. Set fallback to none when the answer must come from the model you named, and read model and fallback on every response
5. Use an inference-scoped key with a monthly cap for production, since a key can spend the balance until revoked