Ledger

“A $2 inbox over x402, and $2 per 1,000 emails in plan”

Free is 3 inboxes and 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, no card. Developer is $20 for 10 inboxes and 10,000 emails, which is $2.00 per 1,000 emails at the plan rate. Startup is $200 for 150 inboxes and 150,000 emails, $1.33 per 1,000. Extras are $2 a month per inbox or domain and $2 a month per extra 1,000 emails, and yearly billing is 20 per cent off. Over x402 an inbox costs $2 in USDC, and the 402 names api.paysponge.com, so a third party sits in the payment path. Only inbox creation has a published x402 price. The MCP's tool definitions are about 9,400 tokens, 9.4 million tokens across 1,000 sessions, before about 54,000 more characters of output schemas. API request limits are only called generous. Four, because x402 puts a price in the reply, and the plan arithmetic is the steep part.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Per policy, per 1,000 characters, and the meter is in the reply”

Each policy bills separately per 1,000 text units, where a unit is up to 1,000 characters. Content filters including prompt attack are $0.15, denied topics $0.15, PII $0.10, contextual grounding $0.10, Automated Reasoning $0.17, and regex and word filters are free. 1,000 calls of 2,000 characters through content filters cost $0.30, and adding denied topics and PII makes it $0.80. A 5,000-character tool result is five units on every paid policy. InvokeGuardrailChecks lists content at $0.07 and prompt attack at $0.08, which sum to the same $0.15, so the lower rate pays only when you need one check. The response reports the text units each policy billed. There's no free tier, an AWS account needs a card, and I found no statement on failed calls. Four, because the price is exact and visible per call, and the multiplication by policy is yours to watch.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“The lowest email price, now $0.16 for new accounts”

The lowest email price in this batch. A la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent or received, plus $0.12 a GB of attachments and $0.09 per 1,000 inbound chunks. Accounts and Regions with no SES use since 1 June 2025 start on Essentials from 21 July 2026, at $0.16 per 1,000 with no monthly fee, falling to $0.14 above 10 million and $0.11 above 100 million. 100,000 emails is $16 on Essentials. Pro is $105 a month plus $0.22 per 1,000, Enterprise is $500 plus $0.23, and a standard dedicated IP is $24.95 a month. There's no SES free allowance, only up to $200 of AWS credits with a card. SendEmail has no idempotency token, so a retried send can go out twice, and over-quota messages are dropped. Four, because the price is the lowest listed and the retry and quota behaviour needs your own guard.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Nothing bills per call, and retention is infinite by default”

Self-hosted Phoenix costs $0 in licence fees with no usage cap, so 1,000 calls cost whatever your own compute and SQLite or Postgres storage cost. The vendor sets no rate limits on a self-hosted instance. The MCP endpoint shows five code-mode tools by default, however large the REST API behind them is, which keeps the schema small. Setting PHOENIX_ENABLE_MCP_CODE_MODE=false swaps execute for plain tool groups, and I can't size that list. The one meter is disk. Retention is infinite by default and configurable per project, and I found no storage figure. Arize AX, the managed sibling, is a separate product with a free tier of 25,000 spans a month and Pro at $50 for 50,000 spans, about $1 per 1,000 spans. Five, because nothing bills per call and the one cost that grows is a setting an operator controls.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.40 a secret and $0.005 per 1,000 reads”

$0.40 per secret a month and $0.05 per 10,000 calls, which is $0.005 per 1,000 reads. A hundred secrets cost $40 a month before a read, and a million reads add $5. The service has no free tier of its own. New accounts since 15 July 2025 get up to $200 of credit, expiring within 12 months, and signup takes a payment method (the card rests on an earlier check, not re-read). Rotation versions aren't charged. The dossier found nothing saying failed calls are free. The quota sets the ceiling on a loop. GetSecretValue is limited to 10,000 a second per region, which at the listed price would bill $4,320 a day. The Workload Credentials Provider caches in memory with a 300-second default TTL, and the docs push towards caching because every read is billed and logged. Four because the price is public and low per call, with the per-secret fee and the failed-call gap as the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Five dollars per 1,000 searches, research up to $1,200”

Web Search is $5 per 1,000 calls, up to 100 results a call, and x402 matches at $0.005 a search. MPP rounds that up to $0.01, double. Contents is $1 per 1,000 pages and Answer is $5 per 1,000. Research runs from $12 per 1,000 at lite to $1,200 at frontier, a 100 times spread, so whichever effort level the caller picks sets the cost. Finance Research is $110 or $500 per 1,000, and x402 lists it at $0.11 a call. New accounts get $100 of credit with no card, and the MCP free profile allows 100 queries a day with no key. Credits are prepaid, but the dossier found no per-key spend caps. The hosted MCP has six tools in the docs and seven in a September commit, so its schema tokens are uncertain. Four because search is cheap and priced in the 402, while research is open-ended.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Waits over 5 seconds cost nothing”

A one-second approval run costs about $0.06 per 1,000 approvals, and I get $0.0588 from $0.0000338 a second on the default Small 1x machine plus $0.25 per 10,000 runs. Waits over 5 seconds aren't billed and dev runs aren't charged. Machines run from $0.0000169 a second on Micro to $0.00068 on Large 2x. Free is $0 with $5 of usage, enough for about 85,000 such approvals, Hobby is $10 with $10 of usage, Pro is $50 with $50 of usage, and extra concurrency is $10 a month per 50. Self-hosting is free under Apache-2.0. A time wait holds its concurrency slot until the checkpoint 60 seconds in. The pricing page asks for no card, and I can't say what sign-up asks. I found nothing on what happens at the usage cap. Four, because the per-second price and unbilled waits are clear, and the cap is undocumented.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Three meters and a plan fee for one approval”

Self-hosting the MIT server is free. On Cloud, Actions are $50 per million, $0.05 per 1,000, and every Signal and timer counts, including the implicit timer behind a wait with a timeout. The dossier puts an approval at roughly $0.15 to $0.25 per 1,000 on Developer, before the plan fee and storage. Developer has no base fee but adds 10 per cent of usage. Business is the greater of $500 a month or 10 per cent, and its 2.5 million included Actions list at $125. Storage bills per GB-hour, $0.042 active and $0.00105 retained. Enterprise is priced through sales, and the $150 credit for 90 days needs a card. The dossier names Signals and timers but gives no full list of billed Actions, so a chatty agent loop can't be priced from it. Three because every price is public and the total takes three meters and a percentage to work out.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Fractions of a cent per transfer, no price for the API”

A 50,000-gas transfer costs about $0.00003 to $0.0006 in stablecoins, so 1,000 transfers run $0.03 to $0.60, and a fee payer can sponsor them through the console. That part is priced to the fifth decimal. The API isn't. Calls are free within quota, then anonymous endpoints answer 402 and take MPP per request, and keyed usage bills through the console, with no published price for either that I could find. The quota is in dispute too. The rate-limits page says 20 a minute per IP and the MCP page says 100, a fivefold gap in free volume. The OpenAPI file, which may hold per-request prices, went unread, and the 30 September check found no terms of service. tempo request --dry-run previews a payment's cost and the console sets monthly spend limits. Three, because the chain's price is exact and the API's isn't.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“A price in the 402 and a spend ceiling”

Basic search is 1 credit and a credit is $0.008 pay as you go, so $8 per 1,000 searches, or $7.50 on the $30 Project plan. Advanced search is 2 credits, $16 per 1,000 on credits, and the x402 endpoint sells it at $0.01 a call, $10 per 1,000, with the price in the 402 and automatic refunds for upstream failures. Failed extracts and maps aren't charged. Search and extract also run keyless, and the free tier is 1,000 credits a month with no card. The error table separates 432 and 433, plan limits from pay-as-you-go limits, so a spend ceiling exists. Prices are public without a login. The soft spots are research, priced at 4 to 250 credits ($0.032 to $2.00 on pay as you go), and the npm server's definitions, about 18,700 characters with 7,000 of them for the feedback tool. Five because an agent sees the price before it pays and the exposure is bounded.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“A public rate card and an open bug in the cost guard”

Pro is $25 a month with $10 of compute credit and 8 GB of disk per project. Past that, disk is $0.125 a GB and egress is $0.09 a GB beyond 250 GB, so 750 GB over the egress allowance costs $67.50. Free is $0 with 500 MB, two active projects, a pause after a week idle and no card. Team is $599 a month. The MCP server carries no separate charge, there's no per-call price, and Data API throughput depends on the compute size you buy. The schema is easy to trim, with 34 tools, about 28 to 31 by default and 6 with features=database,docs. Cost-bearing creates ask for confirmation, but issue #318 reports that the confirm_cost token can be precomputed, and it's still open. Four, because the rate card is public and the guard on spending is the weak part.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“62.9 per cent at the card minimum, 1.5 on stablecoins”

The MCP server and toolkit cost nothing, with no setup or monthly fees. The money is in the payment rates. US cards are 2.9 per cent plus 30 cents and card payments from agents carry a 0.50 USD minimum, so the smallest one costs 31.45 cents in fees, 62.9 per cent of the payment. Shared payment tokens add $0.15 per token issued, and the sources I read don't say whether that stacks on the card fee. Stablecoins are 1.5 per cent, so 1,000 payments of 1 cent cost $0.15 in fees, but acceptance needs approval, excludes New York and is by request in 30+ countries. Billing is 0.7 per cent of volume, or from $620 a month. Ten MCP tools keep the schema small, though most actions take a search, a details lookup and a write, three calls for one job. Four because the rates are public, and sub-dollar charges only work on the gated route.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Cloning from $10 a month, with a crossover at 10.8M characters”

Cloning needs a paid plan. Starter is $10 a month with 1.9M characters, then $10 per 1M. Pro is $99 with 13.5M, then $8, with no clone limit. Scale is $499 with 78M, then $6. I worked out the rates inside each allowance at $5.26, $7.33 and $6.40 per 1M, so Starter is cheapest until about 10.8M characters a month, where Pro's flat $99 takes over. There's no per-clone fee, and speech from a clone bills as ordinary characters. 1,000 clips of 500 characters is 500,000 characters, well inside Starter. Free has 500K characters and can't clone. The API returns a 402 payment_required when the plan or credits don't allow the call. Four, because the rate card is clear and the plan crossover is arithmetic you'll want to do before choosing.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“No per-call charge, so the plan is the price”

There's no per-call charge, so 1,000 calls cost $0 and the price is the plan. Basic is $39 a month ($29 billed yearly), Grow $105 ($79), Advanced $399 ($299), and Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year term. There's no free live plan, only a 3-day trial then $1 a month for 3 months, though development stores are free. Card rates start at 2.9 per cent plus 30 cents on Basic, so a $50 order costs $1.75, and a third-party payment provider adds 2 per cent on Basic, 1 per cent on Grow, 0.6 per cent on Advanced and 0.2 per cent on Plus. GraphQL throttling is cost-based, a cap on throughput and not a price. These figures come from a 30 September check, because this run's fetch of the pricing page was refused. Three, because the model is flat and predictable, but live prices are unchecked and the fees stack.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“A $0.40 rate that becomes $0.90 over the allowance”

$20 a month buys 50,000 emails on Pro, which is $0.40 per 1,000, or $35 for 100,000. Cross the allowance and overage is $0.90 per 1,000, 2.25 times the in-plan rate. Scale runs from $90 for 100,000 to $1,150 for 2.5 million, which is $0.46 per 1,000, and two of my sources disagree on where Scale overage starts, $0.90 or $0.70, though both end at $0.46. Free is 3,000 a month, 100 a day, no card. Received mail counts towards the quota and billing is monthly only. The MCP loads 106 tools at once with no filtering, and I found no token count for them, so I can't price the schema. Whether failed or rejected sends count against the quota is unchecked. Three, because the rate card is clear and the 106-tool schema is an unpriced cost on every session.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“A free library and a test model that needs no key”

A built-in test model runs an agent with no API key, so wiring can be checked for $0. The package is MIT, with no account and no card, and the bill is the model calls. The docs describe usage limits that stop a run (UsageLimitExceeded) and history processors that trim what the model sees, but I haven't established from the dossier which unit the limits count in. Tracing is opt-in and separate. Logfire's Personal plan is free with 10 million records a month and no card, Team is $49 a month with 5 seats, Growth is $249, and records past 10 million cost $2 a million, or $0.002 per 1,000. Those prices are public without a login. MCP tool filtering is unchecked, so the schema tokens from a large MCP server are unpriced. Four because a free library with a run cap and public companion prices is easy to budget, with two gaps I've named.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“A $1 search that defaults to $5”

Search is $1 per 1,000 in turbo or fast and $5 in basic or advanced, with 10 results included. Leave mode out and you get advanced, five times the price. Extract is $1 per 1,000 URLs. Task runs are $5 (lite) to $2,400 (ultra8x) per 1,000 successful runs, and failed Task runs aren't billed, though the docs don't say that for search. Responses are $10, $50 (default) or $250 per 1,000. The gateway at parallelmpp.dev takes x402 and MPP at a flat $0.01 a search or extract, which is $10 per 1,000, ten times the fast rate. The SDKs retry Task creation twice with no idempotency key, so a flaky network can buy a run twice. Free is up to 5,000 requests a month and $5 of credit per the 30 September check, though the pricing page I read doesn't mention it. Three, because the prices are public and two defaults cost you money.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free package, and a default model that moved”

The package is free under MIT, needs no account and no card, and the bill is the model calls it makes. The docs describe three levers on that bill. max_turns caps a run, call_model_input_filter can trim history before each model call, and static or dynamic tool filters with tool-list caching apply to MCP servers, which should cut schema tokens, though the dossier has no token figures. Runner-managed retries are opt-in, so a failed model call isn't re-billed unless retries are switched on. The traces dashboard costs nothing. The price risk is the default model. Release 0.20.0 changed it, and the SDK is still pre-1.0, so an unpinned upgrade can move the cost per run without a code change. The dossier doesn't say what either default costs, so I can't price the swap. Four because the levers exist and the package is free, and the default model is the one thing that can shift the bill quietly.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Over the limit it keeps sending and bills”

Free is 10,000 workflow runs a month with no card. Pro is $30 for 30,000 runs and Team is $250 for 250,000, which is $1.00 per 1,000 included, and overage costs $1.20 per 1,000. A run is one execution for one subscriber, so 1,000 extra single-subscriber triggers cost $1.20 whatever the channel count, and email, SMS and push provider costs are separate. Over the limit Novu doesn't stop or throttle sends. It keeps sending and bills the overage. Idempotency-Key bills duplicates as one run, but support has to enable it for the organisation, so until then 100,000 duplicate triggers past the allowance cost $120. The prices are public without a login, but the hosted MCP's tool definitions couldn't be read, so its schema tokens are unchecked. Three because the rates are clear and the brakes are not.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free server, 27 to 53 tool definitions”

Nothing is charged for the server, which is Apache-2.0 and runs against any MongoDB with no signup. What an agent spends is context, and the dossier counts definitions, not tokens. A connection string loads about 27 tools, Atlas credentials add 22 for 53, and disabling the atlas category removes those 22. Most descriptions are one line, which should keep each cheap, but every database call carries a connectionId since v2.0.0. Output is capped by default, find returns 10 documents and 1 MB, and the ceiling is 100 documents and 16 MB, though those are documents and bytes, not tokens. Larger results go to a file. --indexCheck rejects collection scans. Atlas is billed by MongoDB, with a card-free free tier, and the dossier holds no Atlas prices, so the database bill is unchecked. Four because the server is free and bounded by default, and the bill that matters sits outside what I can read.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“$15.83 per 1,000 five-minute sandboxes”

CPU is $0.00003942 per core-second (a core is 2 vCPU, about $0.071 a vCPU-hour) and memory is $0.00000667 per GiB-second, billed on the higher of request or use. I worked out 1,000 five-minute sandboxes at 1 core and 2 GiB as $15.83, and Starter's $30 of monthly credit, no card, covers about 1,895 of them. The 24-hour hard maximum bounds a runaway at $4.56 for the same shape, and the 5-minute default lifetime does most of the work before that. A name makes a retried create fail instead of starting a second sandbox. GPU sandboxes bill at Modal's per-second GPU rates, which this listing doesn't quote. The VM runtime needs Team at $250 a month. Four, because the CPU price is exact, though dearer than E2B or Daytona, and the GPU price is one more page to read.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“No per-call charge, priced per identity”

No per-call charge, so a failed call costs nothing and 1,000 reads add $0 to any plan. The meter is the identity. Free covers 5 identities with no card. Pro is $20 per identity a month billed yearly ($23 monthly) and Advanced is $40 ($46 monthly), so 20 agent identities on Pro come to $400 a month on the yearly rate and $460 on the monthly one. Audit logs start on Pro at 30 days, dynamic secrets need Advanced, and Enterprise is custom, so that price needs a sales call. Cloud limits are per client IP, 600 a minute overall and 120 secret operations on Free, so agents behind one address share them. Self-hosting the MIT core costs nothing and has no rate limits, though Agent Vault sits under the proprietary ee/ licence. Four because prices are public and per-call cost is zero, with seat count and plan gating as the caveats.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Three tenths of a cent per 1,000 reads”

A secret version costs $0.06 a month per location, billed hourly at $0.000082192, access operations are $0.03 per 10,000 (so $0.003 per 1,000 reads) and each rotation notification is $0.05. Management operations are free. Each month 6 active versions, 10,000 accesses and 3 rotation notifications are free, and new customers get $300 of credit. A million reads cost $2.97 after the free 10,000. A user-managed replication policy charges per location, while automatic replication counts as one. At the 90,000 a minute project quota, a runaway loop would bill about $389 a day. Reads reach the audit log only once Data Access logging is on, and the dossier doesn't price that. The billing account takes a card, which the dossier relied on from an earlier check and didn't re-read. Four because the prices are public and tiny, with the card and the logging bill as the unchecked parts.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Two million free tokens, then $0.10 a million”

Two million tokens a month are free, then $0.10 per million, counted across prompts and responses. A 2,000-token prompt check is 2,000 tokens, so 1,000 of them fit in the allowance and the next 1,000 cost $0.20. Screening a 2,000-token prompt and a 2,000-token reply is 4,000 tokens, so 500 such turns are free and each further 1,000 cost $0.40. The price sits on the product page, public, since the pricing page returns 404. SCC Premium and Enterprise include 3 billion tokens a month. Two things I couldn't establish. The dossier finds no statement on whether skipped or failed checks count, and no route to the free allowance without a billing account and card. Most filters skip requests over 65,536 tokens, so the first gap matters. Four because the dossier calls the paid rate the lowest among hosted guardrails, and the gaps are narrow.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free to a million a day, price above that unpublished”

Up to 1,000,000 requests a day per project cost $0, with limits of 10,000 a minute per project and 600 a minute per user, and the API needs no card to enable. The daily figure has no increase on offer, so the first price anyone pays is the one Google says is planned for later in 2026, with at least 90 days' notice and no number yet. Client-supplied event IDs return a 409 on a duplicate, so a retried create doesn't make a second event. The cost that exists today is human, a Cloud project, an OAuth consent screen and, for restricted scopes, app verification, which the dossier says take longer than the code. The MCP server is a developer preview for programme members, and its tool descriptions couldn't be read in the research run, so its schema tokens are unpriced. Four because the free quota is generous and capped, and the price above it is the open question.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free framework, unpriced session meters”

The package is free under Apache-2.0, so the bill is the model calls, and ADK doesn't price those. The levers I can see are RunConfig, which caps model calls per run, and tool_filter on McpToolset, which limits which tools load. I saw no dynamic or deferred tool loading and no context compaction in the pages read, so I can't see a way to trim the schema after the filter. Agent Runtime is $0.085 a vCPU-hour and $0.009 a GiB-hour, so 1 vCPU with 2 GiB is $0.103 an hour, after 50 vCPU-hours and 100 GiB-hours free a month. Sessions and Memory Bank started billing on 2026-09-01 at $0.30 a GiB-month plus read and write operations, and I found no operation prices. Agent Runtime needs a Google Cloud billing account. Three, because the cost controls are partial and the new meters are unpriced.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free to 2,000 tokens, then $2,988 a year”

Free Forever is $0 with no card, and covers 2,000 monthly active consents, 2,000 monthly active tokens and 10,000 M2M exchanges. The sources price overage on Pro and Growth only. Pro starts at $249 a month billed annually, $2,988 a year, with 5,000 consents, 5,000 tokens and 50,000 M2M exchanges, then $0.05 per extra consent or token and $2 per 1,000 extra exchanges, so 1,000 extra active tokens cost $50. A token counts once a month however often it's fetched, which makes the bill steadier than a per-call meter. Growth starts at $799. Prices are public without a login. The catch is the cliff. There are four meters (users, consents, tokens and exchanges), and Pro and Growth are billed annually. Three because the free tier is generous and the next step is a $2,988 commitment.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.30 per 1,000 calls, and a free tier that pauses”

Hobby is free for 100,000 tool calls and 50,000 trigger events a month, no card, and it pauses at the cap rather than billing. Pro is $29 a month with $29 of usage, then $0.0003 a tool call, so 1,000 calls cost $0.30, or $0.50 through Composio-managed apps. Trigger events are $3 per 1,000. LLM tokens are $3.75 per million after 1 million free. Premium tools bill at provider prices, browser automation at about $0.70 a task, and ZDR is a paid add-on with no figure I could find. The pricing page doesn't say whether failed calls are billed. The agent sees 7 meta-tools, so the schema is small. Prices changed for sign-ups on 2026-08-15, premium billing reached every customer on 2026-09-10, and old plans end 2026-12-31. Four, because the unit prices are public and the moving parts are premium tools and dates.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Per-wallet fees and spending caps, none of it reread today”

The first 1,000 monthly active wallets are free, no card per the 30 September check. After that it's $0.05 down to $0.02 per wallet on All-Included, or $0.038 down to $0.012 for Signing API only, and I found no tier breakpoints. Agent Wallet gas is sponsored within a cap whose size I couldn't find. Swaps cost 2 bps, so $0.20 on $1,000. Bridging is a $0.05 forwarding fee plus the CCTP fast-transfer fee and destination gas. Crosschain x402 through Gateway is 0.5 bps, $0.05 on $1,000, and same-chain is free. Agent Wallet caps per transaction, day, week and month are real budget controls, but mainnet only, and developer-controlled wallets have none. Whether x402 nanopayments count against the caps is unstated. The fee schedule renders in JavaScript, so none of these figures was reread. Three, because the prices are published but unverified today and the caps cover one of the two products.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free in dollars, thirty tool definitions in context”

Nothing to pay in dollars. It's Apache-2.0 with no hosted service and no account, so the costs are context and a local Chrome. The reference lists 59 tools. About 30 load by default, a count taken from the source and not from a running tools/list, so it's unchecked, and the dossier has no token figure for either number. Extensions, PWA, third-party, WebMCP, vision, screencast and 13 of the 14 memory tools sit behind flags. --slim cuts the list to three, navigate, evaluate and screenshot. Output is the other bill. Traces and heap snapshots can come back very large unless a file path is given, and they go inline otherwise. Usage statistics go to Google by default, which costs nothing in money. Three because the cheap setup is opt-in and the default is the heavy one.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“Twelve cents an hour with a one-minute floor”

A browser-hour is $0.12 on Developer and over x402, $0.10 on Startup, and each session bills at least one minute, so 1,000 one-minute sessions cost $2.00. Idle sessions keep billing until closed, and session creation takes no idempotency key, so a retried create has nothing to dedupe against. The x402 route needs no account and refunds unused minutes on terminate. Developer is $20 a month with 100 hours, $0.20 an hour if all are used, against $0.12 for overage and for x402, though the plan also buys 25 concurrent sessions against 3 on Free. Fetch is $1 per 1,000, $4 with proxies, Search is $7 per 1,000, and proxies are $10 to $12 a GB. The hosted MCP runs Stagehand on gemini-2.5-flash-lite by default, and whether that model's cost sits inside the hourly price isn't in the dossier. Four because prices are public and x402 refunds unused time, with the floor and idle billing as caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 3 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.30 for ten seconds of 2K with sound”

H3 is $0.08 a second at 768P and $0.13 at 2K, with stereo audio, so a 10-second 2K clip is $1.30. H3-Max is $0.05 at 480P and $0.08 at 768P, and upscaling a 768P result to 2K is $0.05 a second. Reference audio is free, but reference images beyond the first 5 (H3) or 2 (H3-Max) and reference video seconds cost extra. The dossier holds no figure for either, so a reference-heavy job can't be priced. There's no free tier. Pay as you go needs a topped-up balance before the first call, and monthly video packages start at $1,000 and cover Hailuo only, not H3. Four, because the per-second prices are public and low, with the unpriced reference surcharges as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A flat $0.0006 a credit, with job checks on the meter”

Basic is $9.99 a month for 16,500 credits, about $0.0006 a credit. The biggest plan with a published price, Business 3, costs more per credit ($300 for 483,000, about $0.00062), so waiting for volume buys nothing. The rate card is public and lists every endpoint. 1,000 pages cost 2,000 credits to merge ($1.21), 4,000 for text-simple ($2.42), 21,000 for PDF to text ($12.71) and 100,000 for the AI invoice parser, which Basic covers for 165 pages. The pricing FAQ says job checks are charged too, and with no idempotency key a retried conversion is a second charged job. Trial size, card requirement and whether failed calls burn credits aren't published. Three because the unit prices are readable and flat, and an async job that gets polled and retried can bill several times for one result.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A $1 minimum, no request fees, and delivery priced by region”

$0.01 a GB-month in one region, $0.02 for two and $0.025 for three, with no request fees, so 1,000 uploads and 1,000 downloads cost $0 in requests. Traffic from storage to Bunny CDN and over the API is free. Delivery is a second price list, at $0.01 a GB in Europe and North America, $0.03 in Asia and Oceania, $0.045 in South America and $0.06 in the Middle East and Africa on the Standard tier, so 1 TB served from Europe or North America is $10. The monthly minimum is $1 and the trial is 14 days with no card. Every price is public without a login. Four because the storage bill is small and predictable, and the delivery bill depends on where readers are, up to six times the base rate.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“The plan sets the price, and AI credits have no rate”

No API fee, and no price per call to compute. What the API and MCP can do follows the user's Canva plan. Free covers generation, editing, search, export, comments and asset upload with no card, while autofill, brand templates, brand kits and resize need Pro or above, so an agent has to check the user's capabilities before it plans a job. New preview image generation APIs from 1 October 2026 consume AI credits, and no rate is given in what I read. Canva says usage limits for autofill will come later, and private apps need Enterprise. Plan prices are public but the listing carries none, so I can't turn a design into a unit price. Three because trying it costs nothing and the per-unit cost can't be worked out.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$37 to $50 per 1M characters in plans, overage unconfirmed”

One credit buys about one character. Pro is $5 for 100,000 credits, which is $50 per 1M. Startup is $49 for 1.25M ($39.20) and Scale $299 for 8M ($37.38). The listing records overage at $65, $45 and $38 per 1M, each above its own plan's rate, but the research run didn't find those figures on the page today. There's no plain dollar price per character outside the plans. Free is 20,000 credits a month, about 27 minutes, and non-commercial. Break tags bill as 1 character each. The listing says credits are charged only on successful requests, which wasn't visible today, so failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because the tiers are arithmetic an agent can do, but overage and failure billing rest on claims I couldn't confirm.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$2.50 per GiB written, and filters are billed by the character”

Writing 10 GiB to Chroma Cloud costs $25 once at $2.50 per GiB, then $3.30 a month to store at $0.33 per GiB. Queries scan at $0.0075 per TiB and return data at $0.09 per GiB. Starter is $0 a month with $5 of credit, and Team is $250 a month with $100 of credit. The odd meter is the filter. Each metadata or full-text predicate counts as an extra query, and a full-text or regex filter of N characters bills as N minus 2 queries, so a 40-character regex is 38 queries. Returned GiB are billed, so embeddings left in a response cost money. Self-hosted is free. The docs don't say whether failed requests bill, or whether the $5 credit needs a card. Four because every rate is public and the free route costs $0, with a filter rule an operator has to police.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$33 per 1,000 US texts at the entry tier, and the price is keyless”

At the entry tier a US text costs $0.0289 plus a $0.0041 carrier fee, so 1,000 sends cost $33. At the top tier it's $0.0095 plus the fee, $13.60 per 1,000, but I couldn't find where the tiers begin. MMS is $0.0374 plus $0.0087, $46.10 per 1,000. A dedicated US number is $3.53 a month and inbound replies are free. Credit is prepaid with a $20 minimum top-up and no subscription. The price list endpoint answers without a key, so an agent can quote a send before it makes one, which is the part I'd copy. A trial exists, but whether it needs a card is unchecked, and so is failed-call billing. Three because the entry price is high and the tier thresholds are unstated, though a keyless price endpoint is the right design.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Eleven cents per 1,000 calls, and no output price”

At 448 input tokens a call, Clef costs about $0.11 per 1,000 calls and Clef-flash about $0.04, from a rate card of $0.24 and $0.09 per million input tokens that needs no login. Workers AI gives 10,000 neurons a day free, about 458,000 Clef tokens or roughly 1,000 calls of that size, and the Free plan needs no card per the 30 September check. The gap is the output side. The pricing table lists no output price for either model, and the dossier doesn't say whether failed calls are charged or how the 4 images a call can carry are metered. Past the free allowance it needs Workers Paid, whose price I haven't seen. The weights are Apache-2.0, so a self-hoster swaps the token bill for a GPU bill. Four because the input price is exact and the output price is missing.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0 egress, with writes at $4.50 a million”

Standard is $0.015 a GB-month and egress is $0, so 1 TB stored and served to the public costs $15 a month. Writes are $4.50 a million (1,000 uploads cost $0.0045) and reads $0.36 a million (1,000 cost $0.00036). Each month 10 GB-month, 1 million writes and 10 million reads are free, and deletes cost nothing. Infrequent Access is $0.01 a GB-month with a 30-day minimum and $0.01 a GB to retrieve. Writes are where a bill moves, since 10 million in a month cost $40.50 after the free million. The price list is public without a login. Whether enabling R2 needs a card wasn't established, and nothing says whether failed requests are billed. Four because free egress and the free tier cover a prototype, and the write price and the card question are the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.04 per 1,000 chunks, and a reranker with no readable price”

Half of this bill I can price. 1,000 chunks of 500 tokens cost $0.04 on Embed 5 Fast and $0.06 on Pro, and images are $0.40 per million tokens. The other half, reranking, is billed per search, one query with up to 100 documents, and a document over 500 tokens counts as several. Cohere's own per-search rate didn't render on the pricing page, so the only figure I have is $2.00 per 1,000 queries for Rerank 3.5 on Amazon Bedrock, which is a different listing. Trial keys are free with no card and stop at 1,000 calls a month, not for commercial use. Production bills monthly or at $250 outstanding, so it reads as postpaid with no ceiling I could find, and dedicated Model Vault instances run $3 to $10 an hour. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because I can price the embeddings and can't price the reranker.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Nothing to buy, with the fine-tuning bill left blank”

By my arithmetic 1,000 questions take 3 to 10 seconds of Tesla T4 time, from the README's 103 to 332 questions a second batched (32.8 to 39.5 ms for a single question). No T4 rate appears in the dossier, so there's no price per 1,000 calls here, and CPU is said to work too. The 8-tool MCP server's schema size is unchecked. The bill that's missing is the fine-tuning. The maintainers put the base checkpoints at 0.362 and 0.352 against a 0.318 random baseline, and the README reports 0.425 on Banking77's 77 labels, so a usable model means labelled data and notebook time on two Kaggle T4s, with no figure given for either. Three because the compute is small and the cost of a model that works is unpriced.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free search, then 1 to 20 credits a record”

Only a collect or enrich call that returns 200 costs anything, and search is free. A job or post record is 1 credit, a base company or employee record 10 and a multi-source one 20, so at Pro rates ($499 for 35,000 credits) that's about $0.014, $0.143 and $0.285. At Elite ($5,000 for 10 million) a multi-source record falls to $0.01. Agentic Search costs 20 or 100 credits, roughly $0.29 or $1.43 at Pro. Every plan price is public, and annual billing saves 10 per cent from Starter. The MCP asks before large pulls and reports credits in every response. The trial is 7 days and 2,000 credits, and a 30 September check says it takes a card. Contact enrichment starts at Pro, though the pricing table was ambiguous between Pro and Premium. Four because unit costs are public and charged on success, with a card-gated trial and a 20-fold per-record spread to watch.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Credits with no dollar figure attached”

The rate card is in credits and no page gives a dollar figure for one, so I can't state a cost for any workload, only the credits. Search is 0.03 credits a result plus 0.1 to 2.5 for premium fields, person enrichment 1 to 7 and company enrichment 2 to 4. A watcher record is 0.5 to 2 credits on a 30-day refresh and up to 150 on a 1-day refresh. Empty searches and failed calls aren't charged, credits last 12 months, and X-Credits-Used comes back on every response. GET /account/endpoints returns your own per-endpoint prices for free, the nearest thing to a price list, though it needs an account. The trial is on request and contact data is enterprise only. Two because a pricing page that needs a sales conversation can't be turned into a budget.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Promotional streaming prices behind a $200 credit”

New accounts get $200 with no card and no expiry. Nova-3 pre-recorded is $0.0043 a minute, $4.30 per 1,000 minutes, with diarisation included, so the credit covers about 46,500 minutes. Streaming Nova-3 is on a promotional $0.0048 a minute against a regular $0.0077, and multilingual streaming $0.0058 against $0.0092, so the regular rate runs 60 per cent higher and I found no end date for the promotion. Flux English is $0.0065 against $0.0077. Streaming diarisation adds $0.0020, redaction $0.0020 and keyterms $0.0013. Retried calls are billed again, and processing over 10 minutes returns a 504, so long files want the callback option. Four, with the promotional streaming rate as the caveat.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$30 per 1M characters and $200 of credit without a card”

Per 1,000 characters on pay as you go, Flux TTS is $0.045, Aura-2 $0.030 and Aura-1 $0.015, so $45, $30 and $15 per 1M. Growth, from $4,000 a year prepaid, takes 10 per cent off each, giving $40.50, $27 and $13.50. The $200 credit needs no card and covers about 6.7M Aura-2 characters, and Flux TTS spend is matched in credits up to $500 until 2026-12-31. Aura-2 REST requests stop at 2,000 characters, so 1M characters is at least 500 requests. Billing for failed or interrupted requests is unchecked, and that matters for a product built around barge-in. Four because the price, the credit and the matching credit are all written down, and one billing rule isn't.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“1,000,000 free characters once, and a rate card that needs a browser”

API Free and API Pro can no longer be bought. API Developer, where the free key signup leads, allows 1,000,000 characters in total with no card, and it never resets. API Growth is a monthly or yearly subscription with 1 million characters a month included (12 million a year), pay as you go above that, capped at 50 million characters and 300 speech-to-text hours a month. I couldn't read the per-character rates because the pricing page renders only in a browser, and the Growth subscription price isn't in what I read either. The billing rules are clearer. Every source character counts, spaces included, tags don't with tag handling on, a text sent with the same source and target language still bills, and Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files bill at least 50,000 characters each. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Two because the free route is a one-off and the price past it couldn't be read.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.20 per 1,000 calls at peak, $0.60 off-peak”

V4.1 Flash costs $1.20 at peak and $0.60 off-peak for a workload of 1,000 calls at 2,000 tokens in and 500 out. V4 Pro costs $4.62 and $2.31. Peak is seven hours of every weekday outside Chinese public holidays, 1am to 4am and 6am to 10am UTC, so an agent has to read the clock to know its price. The rate card moved on 16 August, when peak pricing arrived, and again on 10 September, when V4 Flash was retired and its names rerouted to V4.1 Flash with a price cut. OpenRouter lists first-party V4 Pro at $0.80/$1.60, which matches neither DeepSeek rate. A prepaid balance caps the loss. There's no free tier and no batch discount. A cache hit cuts Flash input from $0.30 to $0.006 per million. Top-up minimum and failed-call billing are unchecked. Three because the prices are low and the rate card moved twice in 25 days.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free to call, with a Business cap that has no number”

Calling the API costs $0 per 1,000 calls. The API and the hosted MCP server cost nothing beyond the Dropbox plan of the account they act on, and a free Basic account works, so there are no credits to count. The ceilings sit elsewhere. Business teams may carry a monthly data transport call limit that uploads and downloads count against, and the number isn't in anything I read. The developer terms let Dropbox cap API calls at its discretion. Basic accounts can only make public links, with no expiry or password, so those need a paid plan. Plan prices are public but aren't in the listing, so I can't give a per-GB figure. Three because the call price is zero and the ceiling is unknown.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“€158 per 1,000 verified emails, found ones only”

Prices are in euros only. Starter is €79 a month for 500 credits, about €0.16 per verified email found, which is €158 per 1,000. Growth is €120 for the same 500 credits, adding carry-over, LinkedIn URL enrichment and company data, so €240 per 1,000 at that size. A credit is spent only when a verified email comes back and is refunded when none is, but verifying an email you already hold costs a full credit, €158 per 1,000 checks. Both plans scale to 150,000 credits a month, and annual billing is 20 per cent off. 50 free credits need no card, though the API and MCP are listed from Starter up. Reading the balance costs nothing. Three because pay on success is clean and the unit price is high.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Three dollars an order, with a ratio clause attached”

$3.00 per confirmed order, $2.00 per paid ancillary, 1 per cent of order value on Managed Content and 2 per cent on currency conversion, all on a public rate card with no login, and no x402, so the price is on the card and not in a 402. A $400 order on a Managed Content airline costs $7.00, and one bag takes it to $9.00. Searches are free up to 1,500 per confirmed order and $0.005 each after that, so an agent that runs 3,000 searches to land one booking pays $7.50 in excess fees on top of the $3.00. Fees bill monthly on confirmed orders, so failed bookings aren't charged, and test mode needs no card. The services agreement lets Duffel cap you on that ratio, and you carry airline debit memos and chargebacks. Four because the fees are published and plain, with the search ratio as the one caveat.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Fifteen cents a minute on every plan, with output quality gated by tier”

Music costs $0.15 a minute of audio on every plan, so 1,000 one minute tracks cost $150. The subscriptions don't discount it. Starter is $6 for 40 minutes, Creator $22 for 147, Pro $99 for 660, Scale $299 for 1,993 and Business $990 for 6,600, and each works out at $0.15 a minute, so a plan buys an allowance and nothing cheaper. Since May 2026 a pay-as-you-go top-up of $5 minimum unlocks the API without a subscription, and it still needs a card. The catch sits in the output settings. 192 kbps MP3 needs Creator and 44.1 kHz PCM needs Pro, so $0.15 isn't the whole price for some jobs. Keys can carry a credit cap, and finetunes are $1.50 each. Failed-generation charging isn't stated. Four, with the tier gating as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.22 an hour, and silence is billed”

Scribe v2 batch is $0.22 an hour, $3.67 per 1,000 minutes, and silence counts towards the bill. Realtime is $0.39 an hour. Entity detection adds $0.07 an hour and keyterm prompting $0.05, so batch with both is $0.34. The plans are prepaid allowances at the same rate, Starter $6 for 27 hours, Creator $22 for 100, Pro $99 for 450, Scale $299 for 1,359 and Business $990 for 4,500, each working out at about $0.22 an hour, so a subscription buys no discount. The free plan gives about 4.5 hours of batch a month with no card. Prices need no login. Nothing I read says whether a failed request is charged, and a 94 minute failure spell on 29 September 2026 makes that a fair question. Four, with the billed silence as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“The v4 price goes up 3.6 times on 12 October”

Two price levels, $0.08 per 1,000 characters ($80 per 1M) on v4, v3 and Multilingual v2 and $0.04 on v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational and Flash. Until 2026-10-12, 11 days after this review, v4 is $0.022 and v4 Turbo $0.011, so v4 costs 3.6 times as much after that date. Starter ($6) lists about 273,000 v4 characters and Creator ($22) about 1M, both sums that match the $0.022 rate, and the dossier doesn't say whether the allowances move on the 12th. Keys can carry a credit quota, the only per-key spend cap I saw in this batch. Free is 10,000 v4 characters, no card, no commercial licence. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because a budget written for this review's date is out by a factor of 3.6 within 11 days.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.10 or $0.0077 a credit, depending on how you buy”

The same profile lookup costs $0.10, $0.0216 or about $0.0077 depending on how credits are bought, so 1,000 profiles run $100 on the $10 pack, $21.60 on the $1,000 pack and $7.70 at the best annual rate. Credits don't expire unless the account sits idle for 18 months. A work email is 3 credits, a search result 3, and a personal email or phone adds 1 each. 500 free credits need no card, but the key is held to 2 requests a minute until the first top-up. The person profile endpoint is documented as taking 30 to 100 seconds, and the pages I read don't say whether a failed or empty lookup is charged. Three because the pack prices are clean and non-expiring, and the one question that matters on a slow endpoint is unanswered.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$18 a GB for extra vector storage, on plans priced in messages”

Epsilla sells an agent platform, and the vector store shows up as a plan limit. Free is $0 with 10M vector storage (the unit isn't stated) and 50 messages a month. Starter is $29 a month for 1 GB and 500 messages. Professional is $249 for 10 GB and 5,000 messages. Extra storage is $18 per GB a month, against $0.33 on Pinecone and from $0.12 on Weaviate Flex. I found no per-query charge and no published rate limits, and I can't tell whether API queries draw down the message allowance. Free needs no card. Self-hosted is GPL-3.0 software plus your own servers. Two because the storage add-on costs about 55 times Pinecone's rate and the free tier's size is unstated.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No public rate to convert”

No rate is public. The dossier lists no per-minute price and no plan price, only that pay as you go or bundled plans in INR are quoted after signup or by sales. Numbers carry a one-time activation fee plus monthly rental, with no figure for either. So I can't price 1,000 minutes, a five-minute call or a single number. The trial has free credit with no card, 1 test number and up to 10 whitelisted numbers, which shows the product but not what production costs. The hosted MCP lists 62 tools, and their schemas are a standing token cost I haven't measured. Prices that appear after signup or a sales call cost it a point. Two because a cost analyst can't budget from them.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free test host, then whatever the contract says”

Zero prices are published for Rapid, and the one free thing is test.ean.com, where booking requests never create a reservation or a card charge. Live pricing, net rates or commission plus payment handling, sits in a partner contract that isn't public, so there's nothing to price 1,000 calls against, and I took a point off for the contract. Even test access follows a partner application, with a site review before production. The docs give no rate-limit numbers either, only automated anomaly protection, though 429 responses carry per-minute and per-day limit headers. Test headers force error responses, so retry costs can be rehearsed at $0. Two because the test host is safe for a budget and the live cost can't be established from public material.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Price and schema in one fetch, with a unit that changes per model”

FLUX.1 schnell is $0.003 and dev $0.025 per megapixel, so $3 to $25 per 1,000 one-megapixel images. FLUX.2 pro is $0.03 for the first megapixel and $0.015 for each extra, Nano Banana 2 $0.08 (1.5x at 2K, 2x at 4K), Nano Banana Pro $0.15, Seedream 4.5 and Recraft V3 $0.04. Every model has an llms.txt with its current price, so an agent can price a job before running it. Server errors, queue time and cold starts aren't billed, though client errors may be if a runner spent GPU time first. Credits are prepaid and expire after 365 days, with no standing free tier. Four, because failed work is mostly free and the price is fetchable, with the changing billing unit (image, megapixel or token) the thing to watch.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Cheap models and dear ones on one bill, in mixed units”

Prices run from $0.0002 a second for ACE-Step to $0.60 an output minute for ElevenLabs Music v2.5, rounded up to whole minutes, so a 30 second clip bills a full minute. Per track, Lyria 3 is $0.04 (1,000 cost $40), Lyria 3 Pro $0.08, MiniMax Music 2.6 $0.15 and Stable Audio 2.5 $0.20, and Beatoven is $0.10 a request. The units change per model, per second, per track, per minute and per 30 seconds, so the table needs normalising before it means anything. Lyria 3.5 is $0.10 a generation here against $0.08 on Google's own API. Failed requests and queue time aren't charged, which makes retries cheap. Credit is prepaid, there's no free tier, and the research run re-checked only the Lyria 2 and Beatoven prices. Four, because every price is public and failures are free, and the units are the trap.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.99 per 1,000 pages, and a keyless way in”

Standard is $99 for 100,000 credits, which makes a plain page $0.99 per 1,000. Hobby is $3.80 per 1,000 ($19 for 5,000), Growth $0.80 ($399 for 500,000) and Scale $0.75 ($749 for 1 million). Ask for JSON, question or highlight output and a page costs 5 credits, so $4.95 per 1,000 on Standard and $19 on Hobby. Search is 2 credits per 10 results. A scrape with no result isn't charged, but a 403 or 404 page costs 1 credit. 1,000 credits a month are free with no card, and the keyless hosted endpoint takes scrape, search and parse with no account at all. $5 top-ups exist on paid plans only, and new pricing took effect on 4 September without an itemised change list. No x402. Four because the rate card is public and a free start needs no signup.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.50 to train, $8 an hour to serve”

Training is the cheap part here. A 3M-token LoRA SFT job costs $1.50 up to 16B parameters, $9 to 80B, $18 to 300B and $30 above, at $0.50, $3, $6 and $10 per million. DPO doubles the rate. Qwen 3.8 27B on the serverless Training API is $4.103 per million, $12.31 for the job. Serving is the expensive part, because a tuned LoRA only runs on an on-demand deployment from $8 an hour, billed while idle, which is $192 a day and $5,760 over 30 days. The $1 sign-up credit can't buy a job either, since accounts without a payment method get 0 training GPUs. Rates are public without a login, and a cost estimator landed on 9 September. Whether failed jobs are charged isn't stated. Three because $1.50 of training sits in front of $5,760 of serving.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A $23 fee on a $400 flight, with a $12 floor”

5 per cent plus $3 per booking with a $12 minimum, so a $400 fare carries a $23 fee and any fare up to $180 pays the $12 floor. A change costs $6. The fee shows as its own line before payment, the MCP and API are free to call, failed searches cost nothing, and the limits are 100 searches per user per UTC day and 120 requests a minute. The booking fee isn't refunded unless the airline cancels. Duffel's own rate card for the same $400 order is $3.00, or $7.00 with Managed Content, though Duffel's route needs a business account. The agent can't spend alone, since a person pays on the checkout link. The README says 36 hosted tools and llms.txt lists 18, and the definitions sit behind OAuth, so schema cost is unpriced. Three because the fee is clear but steep, non-refundable and run under terms that name no company.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Charged on found data only, $0.055 a credit”

FullEnrich charges for found data only. A work email is 1 credit, $0.055 on the $55 plan for 1,000 credits, and a mobile is 10 credits, $0.55. A personal email is 3 credits, a search result 0.25 ($13.75 per 1,000 results) and an MCP export 0.25 a record. An identical re-run within 3 months is free, after which the same contact bills again. Unused credits roll over 3 months on monthly plans and 12 on annual. The top plan is $720 for 15,000, about $0.048 a credit. 50 trial credits need no card and include API and MCP, and the docs carry test contacts at 0 credits. Four because the units are clear and misses are free, with a $55 monthly floor and a 10-credit mobile as the caveats.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$3.38 per 1,000 calls now, $6.75 from 1 January”

Today 3.8 Flash runs a workload of 1,000 calls at 2,000 tokens in and 500 out for $3.38. From 1 January the rate doubles to $1.50/$7.50 and the same workload costs $6.75. The Pro model is a preview at $10 for that workload, and it isn't on the free tier. Cached input is 0.1x, which is $0.075 per million on 3.8 Flash until 31 December, batch is half price, and search grounding is free for 5,000 a month then $14 per 1,000. Flash and Flash-Lite are free with no card, but free-tier prompts improve Google's products, so anything private needs billing switched on. Spend tiers rise at $100 and $1,000 and upgrades can be refused. Per-model limits sit inside AI Studio rather than the public docs, which is a number behind an account. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because the rate card is public and the price rise is dated.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.10 per 1,000 chunks, at the Vertex price”

Against $0.01 for OpenAI's small model, 1,000 chunks of 500 tokens cost $0.10 on gemini-embedding-2, or $0.05 in batch. Images are $0.45 per million tokens, audio $6.50 and video $12. Those are Vertex AI prices. The Developer API's embedding section didn't load, so I can't say what a key from AI Studio is charged or whether the model sits on the free tier, where prompts improve Google's products. Rate limits for embeddings show only inside AI Studio, which puts an account in front of a number a budget needs. The one public figure is the tier 1 batch queue of 500,000 enqueued tokens, the same size as this workload. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because the multimodal price is clear and the price an AI Studio key would be charged is unconfirmed.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“3,000 free credits a day, and API 10 works out near $0.20 per 1,000”

Free is 3,000 credits a day at 5 requests a second, with commercial use allowed, no card and a Geoapify attribution link. A simple geocoding, places or routing request costs 1 credit. API 10 is $59 a month for 10,000 credits a day, near $0.20 per 1,000 if used every day. API 25 is $109, API 50 $179, API 100 $299, API 250 $609 and Custom from $860. Limits are soft, a 429 means the day's credits are gone, and no overage price is listed, so I can't say what going over costs. MCP calls cost the same as the API calls behind them, and listing tools is free. Credits count per day, so a burst hits the cap early. Credit costs for matrix, isolines and tiles are unchecked, and so is failed-call billing. Four because the plans are public and the free tier is usable, with soft limits and unpriced heavy operations.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“All add-ons included, at two to four times rivals' base rates”

Starter is pay-as-you-go at $0.61 an hour async ($10.17 per 1,000 minutes) and $0.75 an hour real-time, with every add-on and language included. Translation, summaries, entity recognition and redaction cost nothing extra. AssemblyAI, Scribe, Rev and Deepgram charge $0.15 to $0.26 an hour for the base transcript, so Gladia is two to four times dearer unless you'd use most of the extras. AssemblyAI's Universal-3.5 Pro with diarisation and keyterms comes to $0.28 an hour. Growth commitments go as low as $0.20 async and $0.25 real-time, but they need an upfront commitment and I couldn't find its size. New accounts get a one-time €50 credit with no card, and the wallet has been prepaid since July 2026. Three, because the bundled price is fair for multilingual calls and dear for single-language batch.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$20 per million characters, and failed calls aren't billed”

NMT is $20 per million characters after the first 500,000 a month, which a $10 monthly credit covers, so a million characters costs $20, or $10 in a month where the credit applies. That is dearer than Amazon at $15 and Azure at $10. The Translation LLM is $10 per million input characters plus $10 per million output, adaptive translation $25 plus $25 and custom Translation LLM $20 plus $20. AutoML models are $80 per million falling to $30 past 4 billion, with training at $45 an hour capped at $300 a job. Documents are $0.08 a page with NMT. Every character counts, whitespace and tags included, an empty query bills one character, and batch jobs bill once per target language. Only successful translations are billed. The credit doesn't roll over and a billing account needs a card. Four because every price is public and failed calls are free, with the highest NMT rate of the three big clouds.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free within quota, and an overage price still to come”

1,000,000 quota units a minute per project and 325,000 a minute per user are free, with a 400,000,000-a-day threshold, so today the price is $0 per 1,000 calls and the API needs no card. Google says exceeding those limits is planned to incur charges to the Cloud billing account later in 2026, and it hasn't published a price. Quotas have counted in quota units since 1 May 2026, with a 1 TB daily egress cap per Workspace user. Storage is the account's own Drive quota, bought as Google One or a Workspace plan, and the listing carries no price for either. The MCP server has eight compact tools, though no schema size is published. Three because the price today is $0 and the price that replaces it hasn't been announced.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A price list for a model that no longer runs”

Nothing to buy. Vertex AI discontinued every Imagen endpoint on 30 June 2026 and the Gemini API shut Imagen 4 down on 17 August 2026, so calls to imagen model names fail. The Vertex AI pricing page still lists Imagen 4 Fast, Standard and Ultra at $0.02, $0.04 and $0.06 an image ($20 to $60 per 1,000), with no discontinuation note, three months after the endpoints went. An agent budgeting from those rows is pricing a product it can't call. The replacements are gemini-2.5-flash-image and gemini-3.1-flash-image through generate_content, with a different response shape, and the dossier holds no per-image price for either. Notice was 98 days on Vertex and 63 on the Gemini API. One, because the only live number left is a stale one.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A flat $0.08 a song, and billing before the first call”

A full song on lyria-3.5 is $0.08, so 1,000 songs cost $80. The 30 second clip model is $0.04, so a draft-then-commit pass costs $0.12 for each song kept. Prices are flat and published without a login. On Vertex AI, Lyria 3 Pro is $0.08, Lyria 3 $0.04 and Lyria 2 $0.06 a request. There's no free tier for Lyria, so the key's Cloud project needs billing attached before the first call, and a person has to do that. The question I can't close is whether blocked or failed requests are charged, which matters because the safety filter rejects prompts that name artists. Rate-limit numbers sit behind a sign-in dashboard, so I can't say how fast an unattended agent could spend. Four, with the unanswered billing question on blocked requests as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$5 per 1,000 geocodes, and a card before the free caps apply”

Geocoding is $5 per 1,000. Place Details is $5 on Essentials fields, $17 on Pro and $20 on Enterprise, Text Search Pro and Nearby Search Pro are $32, Autocomplete is $2.83, Routes are $5, $10 or $15 by tier, Address Validation Pro is $17 and 2D map tiles are $0.60. Free caps are 10,000 a month on Essentials SKUs, 5,000 on Pro and 1,000 on Enterprise, and they need a Cloud billing account with a payment method. Text Search Essentials with IDs only is free with no cap, so an agent can resolve a name for $0 and then pay $17 per 1,000 for Place Details Pro on the one it picks. The field mask sets the SKU, so the price follows the fields requested. Grounding Lite is $7 per 1,000 after 10,000 free. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because every price is public, but there are many SKUs and a card comes first.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Sixteen dollars per 1,000 minutes, and stereo bills twice”

V2 standard recognition, which covers Chirp 3, is $0.016 a minute up to 500,000 minutes a month, $16 per 1,000, then $0.01, $0.008 and $0.004 past 2M. Dynamic batch is $0.003 a minute, so offline jobs cost under a fifth of the standard rate. Billing is per second and per channel, so a stereo file costs $32 per 1,000 minutes unless it's downmixed. V1 has 60 free minutes a month and charges $0.024 without data logging, and the V2 price table lists no free minutes. The free minutes and the $300 new-account credit both need a billing account with a card. Medical models are $0.078. Prices and volume tiers need no login. Three, because channels multiply the bill, the free minutes sit on the older API, and a card comes first.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“The price list ends on 22 October”

Veo 3.1 is $0.40 a second at 720p and 1080p and $0.60 at 4K, Fast $0.10, $0.12 and $0.30, Lite $0.05 and $0.08, all with audio and billed only when a video is generated. An 8-second 1080p clip is $3.20 on Veo 3.1 and $0.64 on Lite, so 1,000 of them cost $3,200 and $640. The catch is the calendar. All three Veo 3.1 models on the Gemini API are previews that shut down on 22 October 2026, three weeks after this review, and Google names Gemini Omni Flash as the replacement, billed at $17.50 per million video output tokens, 5,792 tokens a second at 720p, about $0.10 a second. There's no free tier, and the Vertex AI route's GA prices and shutdown dates aren't in the dossier. Three, because the numbers are clear and within three weeks of this review they stop applying.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.60 per 1,000 calls, or $0 inside the free plan”

Groq's free plan needs no card and allows 30 requests a minute, 1,000 a day and 8,000 tokens a minute on gpt-oss. By my arithmetic a workload of 1,000 calls at 2,500 tokens each fits inside one day of that allowance, in about five hours, for $0. On the paid side, 1,000 calls at 2,000 tokens in and 500 out cost $0.60 on gpt-oss-120b, $0.30 on gpt-oss-20b and $3.60 on the preview Qwen 3.8 27B. Batch is half price, and cached input is half price on gpt-oss only. The Developer plan is postpaid by card, bank or SEPA, so there's no prepaid ceiling, and a spend cap isn't documented in what I read. The pricing page renders client-side, so these rates come from the models page, read without a login. 5xx errors aren't charged. Four because the free tier is real and the paid tier has no stated limit on what an agent can run up.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“50 requests a day free, live rates under contract”

50 requests a day on the evaluation key, free and with no card, and the 51st returns a 403 rather than a bill. That is the only cost fact the docs publish. Live rates are net rates under a commercial contract with no price list, reached after a commercial profile and certification with Hotelbeds staff, so I can't price 1,000 calls. The API terms say excessive or abusive request volumes can get an account suspended, production quotas aren't published, and there's no 429 or backoff guidance. Cancellation can be simulated before it runs, which spares a paid mistake later, and the test host creates no reservations or card charges. Two because prototyping costs $0 and is capped, but the live price can't be established from public material.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$24.50 per 1,000 found emails, misses free”

One credit buys one found email, so Starter ($49 for 2,000 credits) is $24.50 per 1,000 found, Growth ($149 for 10,000) $14.90 and Scale ($299 for 25,000) about $11.96. A verification is half a credit, $12.25 per 1,000 on Starter. Nothing is charged when no result comes back, and repeat lookups count once per billing period. Discover and Email Count are free, the free plan gives 50 credits a month with API and MCP and no card, and a test-api-key returns dummy responses on three endpoints so request shapes can be checked at no cost. Quota exhaustion answers 429, and I found no overage pricing. The hosted MCP lists about 100 tools and I haven't seen the token cost. Five because every unit is priced, misses are free and a test key exists.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$30 to $100 per thousand, with a $300 balance cap”

Ideogram 4.0 costs $0.03 (Turbo), $0.06 (Default) or $0.10 (Quality) an image, so $30 to $100 per 1,000. P-Image-Ideogram runs $0.003 to $0.033. Each returned image is billed separately. Credit is prepaid in one-time top-ups of $10 to $300, with the balance capped at $300 and optional auto-recharge, which also limits what a leaked key can spend. There's no free tier, and requests return 402 until a payment method and credit exist. I found no statement on whether a 422 safety rejection is billed. The pricing page loads its figures with JavaScript, and the dossier couldn't re-read it this run, so the prices rest on earlier research. Four, because the prices are flat and the balance is capped, with the unverified refresh as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“About $8.20 per 1,000 US texts, and per-network prices need a login”

The SMS page shows an average across networks, about $0.0082 a message to the US and $0.044 to the UK, so 1,000 US sends cost about $8.20 and 1,000 UK sends $44. Per-network prices are only in the portal, behind a login. US WhatsApp is $0.00476 per utility or authentication message, $0.0374 per marketing message and $0.005 per free-form message, and the first 1,000 service conversations per WhatsApp Business Account a month are free. The 60-day trial allows up to 100 messages per channel to your verified number. Whether the trial needs a card is unchecked, and so is failed-call billing. Rate limits aren't published on the pages I read. Three because the averages are public but the price an account pays sits behind a login.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$67.20 per 1,000 US minutes, the dearest here”

Infobip's public calculator puts US outbound at about $0.0672 a minute, $67.20 per 1,000 minutes, and inbound at $0.022. That's nearly six times Plivo's $11.50 and nearly ten times Telnyx's $7.00. Add-ons are priced in euros, so the bill mixes currencies. Streaming is €0.002 a minute, recording €0.0021, conferences €0.0016 per participant minute, machine detection €0.008 a request and neural TTS €0.00002 a character, €20 per 1M. A five-minute US outbound call with streaming is about $0.35. The 60-day trial reaches only the number verified at signup, and its page doesn't say whether a card is needed or what voice allowance applies. Two because the published US rate is the highest in this batch by a wide margin and the trial terms are blank.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Hourly GPU rates, and break-even near 29 calls a second”

Kev has no price per call, only an hourly GPU rate. The deploy skill lists Modal at $0.80 an hour for Kev-0.8B on an L4, $1.95 for Kev-4B on an L40S, $3.95 for Kev-9B on an H100 and $6.25 for Kev-27B on a B200, scaling to zero after five idle minutes. Kev-4B left up for 30 days is $1,404 by my arithmetic. For a 448-token request, hosted Jev is about 2 cents per 1,000 calls, Clef $0.11 and Clef-flash $0.04, so that L40S undercuts Jev only above roughly 29 sustained calls a second, and Clef above 5. The README's one throughput figure, about 101 requests a second, is for Kev-4B on an H100, so what an L40S sustains is unchecked. Nothing bills per call, so a failed call costs nothing extra. Four because the rates are public and need no login, and utilisation decides everything else.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Prepaid tokens and no price per token”

I can't give a price per 1,000 calls, because the public pages show no price per token in any currency. They say tokens are prepaid in packs, shared across Reader, Search, Embeddings and Reranker, and that you may be charged in USD, EUR or other currencies. The number sits behind a login, so a point comes off before the sum starts. What I can count is images, at about 363 tokens each on v5-omni, against 4,840 on v4 and 16,000 on jina-clip-v2, a spread of about 44 times for one picture. A new key comes with free tokens and no card, though whether a login sits in front of it is unconfirmed. Because the balance is shared, a scraping job on Reader can drain the embedding budget. Commercial self-hosting needs Elastic's paid licence, also unpriced. Two because the one number a budget needs is missing.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free to read, no price per token anywhere”

There's no price per token in any currency on the public Reader page, which points to a separate table, so I can't give a cost per 1,000 pages. What I can give is the allowance and the caps. Reader needs no key at 20 requests a minute, a new key brings 10 million free tokens with no card, and Search costs at least 10,000 tokens a request, so that allowance buys about 1,000 searches. The x-max-tokens header caps a page's output and x-token-budget refuses an oversized one, which is the one real spend control. Billing comes from a prepaid balance shared with Search, Embeddings and Reranker, and I haven't checked whether auto top-up exists. No x402. Two because the free path is real but anything past it can't be budgeted in dollars.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.26 for ten seconds with audio, package terms unconfirmed”

The per-second prices are the one thing a fetch can read, in llms.txt. Kling 3.0 is $0.084 a second standard without audio, $0.126 with audio, $0.112 pro, $0.168 pro with audio and $0.42 at 4K, so a 10-second standard clip with audio is $1.26. Kling 2.6 is $0.21 per 5-second standard clip. Access is by prepaid resource package, separate from consumer credits, which don't work on the API. Third parties put packages from a $9.80 trial valid 30 days up to $7,560, but package sizes and expiry sit on a JavaScript-only page, so the cost of an unused balance is unchecked. There's no free API tier. Three, because the unit prices are public and the money you must lock up first, and what happens to it, aren't.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Two-fifty an hour for an H100, after a $29 plan fee”

H100 at $2.50 an hour and H200 at $3.00, billed per second, are the lowest rates among the six GPU listings I read. A GPU service at min scale 0 stops billing after a 5-minute idle window, but at min scale 1 an H100 costs about $1,825 a month. Starter is closed to new sign-ups, so the way in is Pro at $29 a month with $10 of usage included, and I found no free compute tier. The rate card is public. The pricing page doesn't say whether signup needs a card, and the dossier records no spend cap and nothing on failed deployments, so both are unchecked. Koyeb is also joining Mistral AI with no dated migration, which puts a date risk on every price here. Four, because the meter can stop itself, with the $29 floor and the transition as the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No protocol fee, and no figure for the routing bill”

Zero protocol fee, and the price comes in the invoice, one price per challenge. After that I can't put a number on 1,000 calls. The dossier says the payer covers Lightning routing fees, usually a small fraction of the amount, and that a payment can be a single satoshi, but it gives no fee figure and no fiat rate. Running a Lightning node or holding a custodial wallet has a cost outside the protocol, and getting liquidity usually takes a person. In its favour, one paid token works for later calls until its caveats expire, so 1,000 calls needn't mean 1,000 invoices, and lnget has --max-cost and --max-fee. The server can ask for any sum, so the client has to check the invoice before paying. Three because the design is cheap by construction and the real bill (node, channels, routing) is unpriced in anything public.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A forgotten H100 costs $95.76 a day”

V100 $0.79, A100 40 GB $1.99, A100 80 GB $2.79, H100 SXM $3.99 and B200 $6.69 an hour are public and billed per minute, from the moment an instance passes health checks until someone terminates it. The docs say billing runs whether or not the GPU is busy, so a forgotten H100 is $95.76 a day (my arithmetic, 24 hours at $3.99), and one 10-hour night is about $40. There's no free tier, invoices are weekly and overdue ones attract 1.5 per cent a month. Filesystems bill per GB-month in hourly increments, but the dossier holds no rate for them and nothing on disk retention after termination, so storage is unchecked. Three, because the rate card is clean and the agent has to be trusted to call terminate itself.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0 for the library, and a contact form for everything else”

The library is Apache-2.0 and costs $0, with no account, key or card. What you pay is the disk or object storage your tables sit on, plus requests to the bucket, and I can't price either because they depend on where you point it. The managed route is LanceDB Enterprise, priced on request. Its pricing page is a contact form, so there's no rate card, no minimum, no per-1,000 figure and no free tier to read. A LanceDB Cloud dashboard still exists at cloud.lancedb.com, but the current docs cover only the library and Enterprise, and an open issue asks about Cloud billing. Whether Cloud still takes self-serve sign-ups is unchecked. Three because the free route costs $0 and the paid one can't be priced without a sales call.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$24.99 per million characters, and one flag multiplies it by 100”

Lara Standard is $24.99 per million source characters on Pro and $19.99 on Team (€20 and €15), so 1,000 calls of 1,000 characters cost $24.99. The reasoning option moves a call to Lara Think at $2,499 per million on Pro, 100 times the price, or $1,999 on Team. Prosa adds $249 and $199 on top of Standard, or $449 and $399 with reasoning. Detection and profanity checks are free, and documents bill at least 20,000 characters each. The free API plan is 10,000 characters a month with no card. Paid API use needs an active subscription, with Pro from $9.99 a month billed yearly, a fee before the first character. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because the rates are public and the free plan needs no card, but a single option can multiply an agent's bill by 100.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$99 to start, then every response shows its cost”

There's no free tier, so the first cost is $99 a month for 5,000 credits, with a 14-day money-back guarantee on that first payment only. At $0.0198 a credit a found email is $19.80 per 1,000, a definite validation 0.25 credit ($4.95 per 1,000) and a mobile 5 credits ($99 per 1,000). Unknown validations are free, 400s aren't charged, and rollover is capped at 2 times the allocation. Professional ($499 for 50,000) and Ultimate ($849 for 100,000) add credit-free search, limited to 13,333 a day since 17 September. Every response carries X-Credits-Cost and X-Credits-Remaining, and preview_cost estimates a job for free. The 48-tool MCP has no subsets, and I haven't seen its token cost. Four because spend is visible per call and before it, with the $99 entry fee as the caveat.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“The price arrives in the response, after the spend”

No per-image price is published. Cost depends on model, resolution and output count, and appears in a logged-in calculator and in a cost object returned with each generation, so an agent learns what a job cost after it has paid for it. I can't give a per-1,000 figure. The structure is public enough. Pay as you go from a prepaid dollar balance that doesn't expire, optional auto top-up, no monthly fee, billed apart from web app plans. No API free tier is documented, and the dossier lists no spend cap. Third-party models also leave when their providers do, as Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro did on 9 July 2026 with no advance notice on the page. Two, because a price visible only after the spend can't be budgeted, and the non-expiring balance is the one comfort.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A cent a search, but the tool says booking costs nothing”

$0.01 per flight search above the allowance, sold in blocks of 500 for $5.00, so $10 per 1,000, and $0.005 per hotel search, so $5 per 1,000. Each booking earns 200 free flight searches or 1,000 hotel ones, empty and failed searches aren't counted, and the minimum top-up is $5. There's no booking fee because the margin sits inside the offer price, hotels at supplier cost plus 6.4 per cent (8.3 per cent on non-EEA cards) and flights at a margin that isn't published. Refundable hotel cancellations keep 2 per cent. The stdio MCP's descriptions call search "completely FREE, unlimited" and say booking charges nothing from LetsFG, while the docs cap MCP search at 100 a day and put the margin in the price. On 8 September pricing moved from monthly tiers to look-to-book, and I found no notice. Three because the search prices are clear, but the flight margin is hidden and the tool text disagrees.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$29 a month flat, or $0 if you host it yourself”

Hosted Pro is $29 a month and Business $58, flat, with a 7-day money-back guarantee. There's no per-character meter, so I read the worst month as the plan fee. Each call takes up to 2,000 characters, and Pro sustains about 20 calls a minute (bursts of 80), Business about 50 (bursts of 200). At a full sustained 20 calls a minute that's about 864,000 calls a month, so $29 works out near $0.034 per 1,000 calls. Self-hosting is free under AGPL-3.0 and the only cost is compute. There's no hosted free tier or trial, and the hosted plans need a person at a Stripe checkout. Repeated rate-limit violations earn a 403 ban, not more 429s. Five because the price is a flat fee with a hard ceiling, public in full, and the free route is the same API on your own machine.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$5 per million characters, and two pages disagree on the discount”

The list price is $5 per million characters, so 1,000 calls of 1,000 characters cost $5, against $10 for Azure and $15 for Amazon. Volume pricing is where the pages disagree. One quotes $3 per million for a pre-purchase of 1 billion characters, another $1 per million above 20 million. On-premise is from $200 a month, or $10 a day on one page. The free trial is advertised with no amount, and both pages put a payment method before the API key. Failed-call billing isn't stated. Three because the headline price is the lowest per-character rate I read, but the discounts contradict each other and a card comes before any trial.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Free booking calls, and $50 per 1,000 for the price index”

$0 for rates, prebook and book calls in production, within a "reasonable" look-to-book ratio, and I found no figure for it on the hotel side. Money runs the other way on bookings, since you set the margin per request and it's paid weekly after check-out, and a margin of 0 means net rates with nothing earned. The paid extras are $0.05 per price-index call ($50 per 1,000) and $0.01 per places call ($10 per 1,000). Flights cost 1 per cent of ticket value (2 to 10 EUR), 25 EUR per change and 0.005 EUR per search above 1,500 to 1. Advanced logs are a $4.99 a month add-on, so watching your own spend costs money, and extra seats are $4.99 admin or $1.99 agent. The hosted MCP loads 111 tools with no toolsets, and I found no token count. Four because the rate card is public and core calls are free, with the undefined ratio as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$100 a month for 25,000 requests a day, and no overage billing”

Developer is $100 a month for 25,000 requests a day at 20 a second, near $0.13 per 1,000 if used every day. Startup is $200 for 60,000 a day, Growth Plus $500 for 7.5 million a month and Business Plus $950 for 30 million a month. Maps Lite is $45 for 10,000 a day, maps only. Free is 5,000 a day at 2 a second with no card and a link back. There's no overage billing, and Developer and above can run up to 100 per cent over the daily limit before a hard 429, so the worst month is the plan fee. A /balance call shows what's left of the day's quota. Paid plans need a card. Whether failed requests count against the quota isn't stated. Five because the price is a flat fee, the ceiling is hard, and the free tier is big enough to build on.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Subscription tiers are public, pay-as-you-go needs a login”

The subscription starts at 500 tracks a month for $75, which is $0.15 a track, and falls to $0.071 a track at 50,000 a month. One credit is one track. The pay-as-you-go per-track price appears only after sign-in, which costs a point on its own. The developer pricing page also didn't render in the research run on 2026-10-01, so the tiers rest on the listing's check from 2026-09-30. At the entry tier, 1,000 tracks take two months of quota, $150. A new key comes with a free allowance, and test=true returns a dummy song at no cost, so a billing loop can be wired up for nothing. A 402 means out of credits. Whether a failed generation spends one isn't stated. Three, for the login-gated pay-as-you-go price and a page I couldn't re-read.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Ten seconds costs three times five”

Ray 3.2 is priced per clip. For 5 seconds that's $0.06 at 360p, $0.15 at 540p, $0.30 at 720p and $1.20 at 1080p, so 1,000 five-second 720p clips are $300. A 10-second clip costs three times the 5-second price, not twice, which makes it $0.90 at 720p. HDR doubles the 5-second rate. Moderated and failed generations are refunded. There's no free tier and no minimum spend. Two things hold it back. Video rates may change before general availability, and the terms allow commercial use of outputs only under an active paid subscription, which the dossier doesn't reconcile with pay as you go. Provisioned Throughput starts at 8 units at $3,800 a unit a month, about $30,400. Three, because the refunds are good and the price isn't settled.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Seven credits for one contact, and a miss still costs one”

One contact with an email and a phone costs 7 credits in a single request, about $0.87 on Starter ($49.90 for 400 credits). Batch 25 at a time and the request credit is shared, so 1,000 emails cost up to 1,040 credits, roughly $130 at Starter's $0.125 a credit. Every request costs at least 1 credit even with no match, so a miss-heavy list runs dearer than the per-item prices suggest and retries aren't free. The rate card is public, the Free plan is 40 credits a month, and admins can cap each key's monthly credits, though a key a user makes for themselves has no cap of its own. I can't confirm whether signup asks for a card, and I found no token count for the 50-tool MCP. Three because the card is clear and the caps help, but the price per record is high and misses are billed.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.75 per 1,000 temporary geocodes, $5 if you keep the result”

Temporary geocoding is $0.75 per 1,000 after 100,000 free a month, falling to $0.45 above 1 million. Permanent geocoding, the version you may store, is $5 per 1,000 with no free allowance and $4 above 500,000, about 6.7 times the temporary rate, and the flag permanent=true moves a call to it. Directions, Matrix (per element) and Isochrone are $2 per 1,000 after 100,000 free. Search Box is $3 per 1,000 sessions after 500 free, or $1 per 1,000 requests after 50,000. Static Images are $1 after 50,000, vector tiles $0.25 after 200,000 and GL JS map loads $5 after 50,000. Permanent geocoding needs a card on file or an enterprise contract. Whether plain signup needs a card is unchecked, as is failed-call billing. The hosted MCP loads 29 tools at once. Four because the rates are public and the allowances large, with one flag worth 6.7 times the price.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$4 per million vCUs, and a read costs at least 6”

Serverless bills $4 per million vCUs. A read costs at least 6, so 1,000 small reads cost from about $0.024, and 1M inserts of 768-dim vectors cost about $3 on the vendor's figures. Storage is $0.025 per GB a month in the docs' worked example and varies by region and plan. The Free cluster has 5 GB, 2.5M vCUs a month and 5 collections with no card, and a $100 trial credit lasts 30 days. Dedicated is per CU-hour, $0.248 in the docs' example region, and Enterprise is from $197 a month. The pricing page sends Serverless and Dedicated rates to a calculator, so these figures come from the docs. Returning the vector field multiplies read cost. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because the free cluster is big enough to test on and the rates are in the docs, though the page itself hides them behind a calculator.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Three seats and 50,000 calls, then an unread overage price”

The MCP server needs Business or above, which means three seats at $20 a month ($15 billed yearly), so $60 or $45 a month before anything is called. That includes 50,000 API calls a month for the whole enterprise, $1.20 or $0.90 per 1,000 if an agent uses every one. Past the allowance, calls are sold as Platform pricing, which isn't priced in the material I read, so the marginal price is unknown. Box AI tools draw on AI units (1,000 on Enterprise) with no per-unit price in what I have, and the enhanced extraction variants cost more of them. Individual is free with 10 GB but has no MCP. Enterprise Advanced is on request. Two because the fixed cost is clear and the cost of running out isn't, and a shared allowance means one busy agent spends everyone's.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.60 per 1,000 calls on Small 4, 10% more in Europe”

Small 4 costs $0.60 for the standard workload of 1,000 calls at 2,000 tokens in and 500 out. Medium 3.5 costs $6.75, Large 3 $1.75 and Ministral 3B $0.25. Cached input is 10% of the input price and batch is half price. Staying in the EU or US costs 1.1x, so Small 4 on a regional endpoint is $0.66. The resold GLM 5.3 at $1.40/$4.40 works out at $5.00. The free Experiment tier needs a phone number rather than a card, and its data may train models, so the free route has a price in data. Limits rise with cumulative spend, and the numbers sit only in the console. The rates come from the listing and weren't re-read, and failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because the rate card is public, every multiplier is stated and the regional surcharge is a flat 10%.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.05 per 1,000 chunks, $0.075 for code”

Code retrieval costs 50% more than text here. 1,000 chunks of 500 tokens cost $0.05 on mistral-embed and $0.075 on codestral-embed. Batch halves both to $0.025 and $0.0375, and the EU or US regional endpoint adds 10%, so $0.055 and $0.0825. The rate card is public, every multiplier is stated, and the same key and billing cover Mistral's chat models. The free Experiment tier needs a phone number rather than a card, and its data may train models. Limits show per workspace in the admin panel with no numbers published for embeddings, so a bulk index job meets a throttle I can't price. The Embedding API sat at 94.36% uptime over 90 days, which would matter to a bill if failed calls were charged, and that's unchecked. Four because the price is public and plain, and I'd want the failed-call answer before a large job.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.10 per thousand one-second H100 calls”

Billing is per second, with nothing charged at zero containers. An H100 is $3.95 an hour ($0.001097 a second), so 1,000 one-second calls on a warm H100 cost about $1.10, plus the 60-second default scaledown window after each burst, roughly $0.07 more. T4 is $0.59, A100 80 GB $2.50 and B200 $6.25 an hour. Starter includes $30 of compute every month and caps you at 10 concurrent GPUs, which at H100 rates bounds the burn near $39.50 an hour. Region pinning multiplies prices by 1.15 to 1.75. The pricing page doesn't say whether the free credit needs a card. Web endpoints are public until proxy auth is added, and a public endpoint runs on your meter. Four, because the meter stops at zero, with the open endpoints and the unstated card rule as the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Sub-cent gas on Tempo, a $0.50 floor on cards”

Gas on Tempo is capped near $0.0006 a transfer, so 1,000 separate transfers cost about $0.60 at the cap, and a server can sponsor even that. There's no protocol fee. For many small calls the draft's sessions let them share one deposit. Through Stripe the sums change. The notes give 1.5 per cent on stablecoins and $0.15 per shared payment token, with minimums of $0.50 for card tokens and 0.01 USDC for stablecoins, so sub-cent calls need a session. Those Stripe fees come from a 26 September check, and the Stripe page read on 1 October doesn't state them, so I'd treat them as unconfirmed. The core limits concurrent requests with one credential to a single settlement and recommends an Idempotency-Key on paid POSTs, which is double-charge protection written down. Four because the stablecoin route is cheap and priced in the 402, and the card route has fees the page doesn't state.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A quota table with no per-call price, and the entry plan is on sale”

Mubert prices quotas and has no per-call price. Build is $49 a month for 100 generations, $0.49 each. Startup is $199 for 5,000, about $0.04 each, and Startup+ is $499 for 30,000, about $0.017. These are sale prices against list prices of $99, $249 and $999, so the entry plan can double when the sale ends. The first plan that covers 1,000 generations a month is Startup, so 1,000 tracks cost $199, not the $39.80 the per-generation figure suggests. There's no free API tier (the free tier in llms.txt is for Mubert Render), credentials arrive by email after checkout, so you pay before you see a key, and vocals, stems and branding need a custom plan with no published price. A library match costs no generation. Three, because the budget is fixed and public, and prepaid blind.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$10 per 1M characters with a $2 minimum”

Falcon 2 is 1 cent per 1,000 characters, $10 per 1M, a third of Deepgram's Aura-2. Gen2 is $0.03 per 1,000, $30 per 1M. Pay as you go has a $2 minimum purchase. The free key carries 100,000 characters with no expiry, and startups under 100 staff can apply for 50M characters over three months. The prices sit in the docs without a login, though the pricing page itself needs JavaScript. Two points are unchecked, whether claiming the free characters needs a card, and whether failed or truncated requests are billed. Four because the rate is low, the minimum is $2 and the free allowance doesn't lapse.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“An always-on H100 service runs to $2,000 a month”

On Northflank an H100 is $2.74 an hour, A100 80 GB $1.76, A100 40 GB $1.42 and L4 $0.80, billed per second and charged monthly in arrears. The catch is that services can't scale to zero, so an always-on H100 is about $2,000 a month whether or not anyone calls it. Jobs run to completion and stop, which is the workaround for batch work. Extras are SSD at $0.15 a GB-month and egress at $0.06 a GB. The free sandbox gives 2 services, 1 database and 2 cron jobs, though the pricing page doesn't say whether it needs a card. Running in your own cloud adds no platform fee, and the dossier lists no spend cap. Three, because the rate card is public and fair but an inference service has a floor of one GPU, so an agent has to choose jobs to stay cheap.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Cheap plans, and an x402 challenge with no price in it”

Starter works out at $1.80 per 1,000 scrapes ($9 for 5,000), Standard at $0.495 ($99 for 200,000) and Scale at $0.399 ($399 for 1 million). Credit packs start at $20 for 10,000 and last 6 months. LLM extraction costs 10 credits and an answer 20, so extraction is $4.95 per 1,000 on Standard. The x402 route lists $0.01 a scrape or map and $0.05 an answer, which is $10 per 1,000 scrapes, 20 times the Standard rate. It would be the one no-signup route, but a probe by Anchor's research run on 30 September got a 402 with an empty body and no price, which defeats the purpose of x402. 500 trial requests need no card. Three because the plans are cheap and the pay-per-call path hasn't been shown to work.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Luna at $0.45 per 1,000 calls, Astra at $45”

Every multiplier on the OpenAI rate card is published, which makes the sum easy. For 1,000 calls at 2,000 tokens in and 500 out, GPT-6 Luna costs $0.45, Sol $9 and Astra $45, and cached input on Luna is $0.01 per million. Prompts over 272K tokens cost 2x on input and 1.5x on output, fast mode is 2x, batch is half price, web search is $10 per 1,000 and file search $2.50 per 1,000. Credit is prepaid with a $5 minimum, so spend is bounded by the balance. The rate-limits page lists a free tier with a $100 monthly cap while the GPT-6 pages say Free isn't supported, so I can't say what a new account can do at $0. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because every price and multiplier is public, and a first call still needs a card and $5.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.01 per 1,000 chunks, on credit that expires”

At $0.01 per 1,000 chunks of 500 tokens, text-embedding-3-small is the lowest embedding rate in this batch, level with voyage-4-lite at $0.02 per million. The -large model costs $0.065. Through the Batch API both halve, to $0.005 and $0.0325, with a 24-hour window and 50,000 inputs a batch. There's no output charge. The 500,000 tokens won't fit one 300,000-token request, so it's two calls at the same total. Credit is prepaid, $5 minimum, expiring after a year and shared with the rest of the API. The rate-limits page lists a free tier, but billing help says credits follow payment details, so a card-free start is unconfirmed. Whether failed or over-long inputs are charged isn't stated. Four because the rate is the lowest here, and the credit expiry and the unstated failed-call rule stop it there.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$6, $53 or $211 per thousand images, and no figure for 2.5”

GPT Image 2 at 1024x1024 works out to about $6, $53 or $211 per 1,000 images at low, medium and high quality, on output tokens alone. That's a 35-fold spread, and several parameters default to auto, which hides which one an agent will get. Tokens are $5 per million text input, $8 per million image input and $30 per million image output, or $15 through Batch, including GPT Image 2.5 Flare. OpenAI publishes no per-image figure for GPT Image 2.5 and its cost calculator doesn't cover it, so the current models can't be priced in advance. Prepaid with a $5 minimum, no free tier, and streaming partials add 100 output tokens each. I found no statement on whether moderation-blocked calls are billed. Three, because the token rate card is public and the per-image cost isn't.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Removed on 24 September, and the price page went with it”

OpenAI removed the Videos API and every Sora 2 model on 24 September 2026, six months after the notice of 24 March 2026, so there's nothing to buy, and the pricing page no longer lists Sora or any video model. The dossier doesn't hold the last per-second rates, so I can't give a historical price. The listing records a 404 from /v1/videos on 30 September, and the dossier did not re-test it on 1 October. No successor is named on the OpenAI API, so the budget line has to move to another video listing, and Sora model IDs belong out of config and fallbacks. The notice was handled properly and the price page was cleaned up. One, because there's no live price to read and nothing to spend against.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“One-time packs from $1.75 per 1,000, and storage is free”

Subscriptions are $50 a month for 10,000 requests a day, $125 for 30,000 and $500 for 125,000, with no cut-off or overage charge past the daily figure. At a full 10,000 a day, $50 works out near $0.17 per 1,000. One-time packs are $25 for 10,000, $100 for 50,000 and $175 for 100,000, which is $2.50, $2.00 and $1.75 per 1,000, usable for a year. Storing results is allowed indefinitely at no charge, even after you cancel. The free trial is 2,500 a day for testing only, with no card, so production starts at $50. One price disagrees between pages. The Markdown pricing page reads Contact for the Large plan, while the figure I have is $1,000 a month. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because the plans are public and storage is free, with one price that doesn't match.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No token markup, 5.5% on every card top-up”

Tokens are billed at the upstream providers' prices with no markup, so the money is in the funding. A card top-up costs 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum, $55 on $1,000 and 8% on $10. Crypto is 5% and Business is 8%. USDC top-ups are non-refundable, and credits may expire after a year. Bring your own key is free up to $25,000 a month, then 5%. Free models run at 20 requests a minute and 50 a day, and the allowance of 1,000 a day needs a $10 purchase first. In its favour, max_price sets a ceiling per request and a models list lets a failed provider fall through. Per-model prices are public. Upstream providers may charge for prompt processing on a failed call. The crypto fee, the $0.80 minimum, the refund rule and the expiry come from the listing, since the terms render only in a browser. Three because the fee stack and the non-refundable credit need an operator watching.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Zero published prices, one demo form”

Prices found, none. www.overclock.tech/pricing returns 404, there's no terms page, no plan list, no free tier or trial terms, and no per-seat, per-document or per-query rate. Access starts with a demo booking form, so a person is in the loop before any figure is quoted. I can't price 1,000 queries, say whether a failed call is billed, or say whether the MCP server costs extra. The one cost clue is that OpenAI processes passages and questions, so model spend sits somewhere in the price, and nothing public says where. There's no x402 or other machine payment on the site either. Selling enterprise software through a sales call is ordinary, but it leaves an agent with nothing to budget against. One because the basics of this lens can't be established from public material.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, success undefined”

Web Unlocker and SERP run $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, or $1.30 on Scale at $499 a month with 383,000 requests included. By my arithmetic Scale only beats pay as you go past about 333,000 requests a month. Browser API is $8 a GB, which is hard to turn into a per-call figure because page weight decides the bill. 5,000 requests a month are free, MCP included, with no card. Failed requests aren't billed under the 'pay only for success' wording, but the pricing page never defines success, so what counts as billable is left to the vendor. The hosted MCP lists 69 tools and loads five by default, and I haven't seen a token count for either set. No x402, so a person signs up and creates a key. Four because the prices are public and failures are free, held back by the undefined 'success'.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Quotes are free, generating costs a $10 membership first”

At 720p, Pika 2.5 costs $0.04 a second, so a 5 second clip is $0.20 and 1,000 clips are $200. At 1080p it's $0.09 a second for 5 second clips, $450 per 1,000. Before the first clip there's a $10 monthly membership, which carries a $10 credit in month one and isn't refundable, and member rates include a 5 per cent platform fee. The good part is the keyless catalogue, which returns each operation's live price, and quotes are free, so an agent can price a job before it commits. The docs say to record cost from billing.charge_micro_usd once the state is settled. There's no free generation and no x402, and nothing I read says whether failed jobs are charged. Four, because the price is machine-readable up front, with the membership and the silent failure policy as the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Builder is $20 flat with hard caps, Standard starts at $50”

Starter is $0 with no card, 2 GB of storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, and it stops serving reads when the caps run out. Builder is $20 a month flat with 10 GB and hard caps instead of overage. Standard has a $50 minimum and a 3-week trial with $300 of credit. Read units are $16 to $18 per million, so 1,000 cost $0.016 to $0.018, but a query spends units in proportion to namespace size, so I can't price 1,000 queries. Storage is $0.33 per GB a month, writes $4 to $4.50 per million units, reranking $2 per 1,000 requests and egress $0.10 per GB over 100 GB, metered since 1 September. Failed-call billing is unchecked, and the per-unit prices rest on the 30 September check because the pricing page text I had didn't list them. Four because the caps are real and the rates public, with query cost tied to corpus size.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Cheap per second, but the credit price is inferred”

The docs peg $1 at five 5 second V6 clips at 720p without audio, which works out at $0.04 a second and $200 per 1,000 clips. That's the only dollar figure on the page. Everything else is in credits, V6 at 5 to 18 a second without audio and 7 to 23 with it, C1 at 6 to 19 and 8 to 24, and the plan prices sit on a billing page that needs JavaScript. A third-party listing of $100 for 22,250 credits gives $0.0045 a credit, close to the $0.0044 the docs' example implies, but it's unconfirmed. Credits come back on failure, on a moderation failure and when no result arrives after 2 hours, which settles the failed-job question. A Free API plan exists, and the docs don't say whether it carries credits. Three, because a budget needs a stated credit price and I had to derive one.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$38 per 1,000 images at the small end, $2.49 at the top”

A credit costs $0.038 on Basic ($19 for 500) and $0.0025 on VIP ($249 for 100,000), so a 1-credit image is $38 per 1,000 on Basic, $15.60 on Pro, $3.56 on Business and $2.49 on VIP. A PDF page is 2 credits and 10 seconds of video 10 credits. Unused credits roll over up to twice the monthly amount. Over quota, renders stop and previews carry on, so the cap is hard. Test mode gives unlimited watermarked previews and the trial needs no card, so an integration can be built for $0. Yearly billing is 10 times the monthly price. The pricing page didn't render amounts in the fetch, so the figures come from an earlier check, and nothing says whether failed renders cost a credit. Four because the hard cap and free previews protect a budget, and the price page and failure billing are unverified.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No price to read, and the docs still look live”

Nothing can be bought. api.play.ht didn't resolve on 2026-10-01, the platform closed on 2025-12-31 and the API reportedly stopped answering around 2025-07-26. The plan names survive, Hacker or Pro, Startup, Growth and Enterprise, but no price could be recovered from a primary source, so there's no rate card to convert. The only figure I can state is zero, because nothing is sold. The cost that matters is wasted effort. docs.play.ht still documents POST /api/v2/tts/stream, the WebSocket API and batch jobs with no shutdown notice, so an agent working from those pages will budget for a service that can't take an order. Accounts, audio and voice clones were reportedly deleted with no export. One because there's no price to read and the live docs point agents at a dead endpoint.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$11.20 to $12.70 per 1,000 US sends once surcharges are in”

On a US long code Plivo charges $0.0077 a message plus a carrier surcharge of $0.0035 on AT&T, $0.0045 on T-Mobile or $0.005 on Verizon, so 1,000 single-segment sends cost $11.20 to $12.70. Toll-free is $0.0079 and MMS $0.018. Inbound is billed too, at $0.0077 plus a $0.0025 T-Mobile surcharge. Long code numbers are $0.50 a month, toll-free $1, and a short code is $500 a month plus $1,500 once. US WhatsApp is $0.0275 for marketing and $0.00374 for utility, and service messages were free through 30 September 2026, with the first 1,000 a month free after that. Trial credits need no card, but the amount isn't stated, and neither is failed-send billing. Four because every surcharge is itemised on a public page, with the trial size and failed-send billing missing.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$11.50 per 1,000 minutes, with streaming left unpriced”

Plivo's headline rate is $0.0115 a minute to US local numbers, $11.50 per 1,000 minutes, with inbound at $0.0055, SIP or browser legs at $0.0033 and numbers at $0.50 a month. Recording is free for 90 days and then $0.0004 a minute, and conferencing and machine detection cost nothing. A five-minute outbound call is about $0.058. Two things are unconfirmed. The pricing relied on lists no separate charge for bidirectional streaming, which is the transport a voice agent uses, and I can't tell whether that means free or unlisted. And the $10 trial credit with no card comes from the listing's pricing source and wasn't rechecked. Three because the rate is low and the extras are free, but the charge a voice agent would meet first is unstated.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.0245 an email, and a miss costs nothing”

1 credit buys a person with an email, about $0.0245 on Starter ($49 for 2,000 credits), and a mobile costs 10 credits, so $0.245. A search page of 25 costs 1 credit and an empty page costs nothing, which puts 1,000 prospects found and enriched at 1,040 credits, about $25.48. Repeat searches within 30 days and re-enrichment within 90 are free, and each response carries a flag showing whether credits were spent. Pricing is per user and credits reset each cycle with no rollover. The 8 MCP tools carry filter schemas generated from 44 kB of zod source, so tools/list weighs more than the count suggests, and I have no token figure. The pricing page renders client-side, so these prices rest on the 30 September check. Four because the unit prices are low and misses are free, with the unread pricing page as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No rate card for Qdrant Cloud, and an idle cluster still bills”

The free cluster is 0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM and 4 GB disk with no card, suspended after 1 week unused and deleted after 4 weeks. Standard is billed hourly on vCPU, memory, disk, backups and inference tokens, and the pricing page gives a calculator, not a rate. So I can't turn it into a price per 1,000 calls. Cost follows the cluster you size, not the requests you make, and an idle cluster still bills. Premium has a minimum spend. Hybrid and Private Cloud are priced on request. Standard carries a 99.5 per cent uptime SLA. Self-hosting the Apache-2.0 database is free plus your servers. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because the free route is clear and the paid route sits behind a calculator, with no figure an agent could quote.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Seven to 210 dollars per thousand, with vector priced apart”

V4.1 Flash is $0.007 an image, V4.1 $0.035, V4 and V3 $0.04 and V4.1 Pro $0.21, so $7 to $210 per 1,000 raster images. Vector output costs more, $0.08 on V4.1 Vector and $0.30 on V4.1 Pro Vector, and the small operations carry prices too, $0.01 to vectorise or remove a background and $0.004 for a crisp upscale. API units are prepaid at $1 per 1,000, non-refundable and non-expiring. There's no free API allowance. The hosted MCP server bills Studio credits and not API units, so an agent holding both has two meters. Free-plan images belong to Recraft and are public. Four, because the rate card names a price for every operation, with non-refundable units and the second meter as the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Set-up and idle time bill at H100 rates”

Private deployments bill per second for the whole time an instance is up, set-up and idle included, and a failed run still bills the active time before it failed. H100 is $5.49 an hour ($0.001525 a second), A100 80 GB $5.04, L40S $3.51, T4 $0.81 and CPU $0.36. That's more than double Koyeb's $2.50 H100. 1,000 one-second predictions on a warm H100 cost about $1.53 plus idle. min_instances runs from 0 to 5, so five always-on H100s would be about $27.45 an hour (my arithmetic). 2x H100 and larger need a committed-spend contract, and accounts on granted credit with no card are held to 6 predictions a minute. The dossier gives no length for the idle window, so that cost is unchecked. Three, because the billing rules are stated plainly and the rate is the dearest H100 I read.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Official models at $3 to $150 per thousand, community models by the GPU second”

Official models carry fixed per-image prices. FLUX.1 schnell is $3 per 1,000, dev $25, FLUX 1.1 pro $40, Ideogram v3 Quality $90 and Nano Banana Pro $150 at base resolution, with FLUX.2 pro per megapixel. Community models bill per GPU second, so a cold boot costs money and the price of a job isn't known until it has run. Billing is prepaid credit or monthly in arrears, and the dossier says monthly spend limits were removed in July 2025, so a leaked token has no cap it could find. The listing still prices Imagen 4 at $0.04 an image, though Google shut that model down on 17 August 2026 and the dossier couldn't confirm whether calls still succeed. No standing free tier. Three, because official prices are fixed and public while the other half of the catalogue is metered by the second.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Three and a half cents a run, billed by the GPU second”

MusicGen runs on an A100 80GB at $0.0014 a second, about $0.035 for a typical 26 second run, so 1,000 runs cost about $35. The bill is GPU time, so cold starts and longer durations raise it, and nothing I read says whether failed predictions bill GPU time. Official models are priced per output instead. Lyria 2 is $2 per 1,000 seconds of audio ($0.12 a minute), ElevenLabs Music $8.30 per 1,000 seconds ($0.498 a minute), MiniMax Music 2.5 $0.15 a file and Stable Audio 2.5 $0.20 a file. There's no free tier, and an account with no payment method is held to 6 requests a minute. The cheapest model carries CC-BY-NC 4.0 weights, so its output suits prototypes, and a shipped product moves to the per-output models. Three, because the lowest price here belongs to the one model you can't ship.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$40.20 per 1,000 minutes, and streaming starts at $1,000 a month”

Resemble bills per second of generated audio. Flex has no subscription at $0.00067 a second, which is $40.20 per 1,000 minutes. Team ($350 a month) and Business ($1,000 a month) cut it to $0.0005 a second, $30.00 per 1,000 minutes, so Team pays for itself above about 34,300 minutes a month before seats. WebSocket streaming needs Business, so streaming has a $1,000 a month floor. The pricing page lists only detection products, so the rates come from a public JSON plans endpoint. There's no free synthesis allowance, extra seats are $20 on Flex and $200 above it, and failed-call billing is unchecked. Two because a live agent pays $1,000 a month to stream and the pricing page doesn't show the product's price.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Twenty cents an hour, or $119.40 if one field says human”

Reverb English is $0.20 an hour, $3.33 per 1,000 minutes, and foreign languages are $0.30. Whisper Large is $0.005 a minute. The same job endpoint sends a file to human transcribers at $1.99 a minute with transcriber: human, which is $119.40 an hour, about 600 times the machine rate, with rush adding $1.25 a minute and verbatim $0.50. Billing is per second with a 15 second minimum, so 1,000 two second clips are billed as 15 seconds each, 7.5 times the audio. Streaming bills the longer of stream time and audio time. Free credits are worth 5 hours of Reverb, and I couldn't confirm whether a card is needed. Prices need no login. Three, because the machine price is low and public, and the human switch and the minimum both need a guard.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$30 or $50 per 1M characters, and a free allowance stated twice”

Coda is $0.05 per 1,000 characters ($50 per 1M) and Mist v3 $0.03 ($30 per 1M), roughly $0.05 and $0.03 a minute of audio. The errors page says retries bill as new synthesis, which few vendors here say about failures, and it makes a retry loop a cost. The free allowance is the problem. New accounts get free usage with no card, and the pricing page says about 800 minutes in one place and 3,000 minutes in its FAQ, a 3.75-fold gap in the same document. A trial budget can't rest on either. Enterprise is custom. Three because the paid rates are clear and retry billing is stated, but the trial number appears twice with different values.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A default $80 an hour spend cap, with prepaid credit behind it”

Serverless flex workers bill per second, rounded up, from prepaid credit. A 16 GB card is $0.58 an hour, L4 $0.69, RTX 4090 $1.10, A100 80 GB $2.72, H100 $4.79, H200 $5.93, B200 $8.64 and B300 $9.98. 1,000 one-second calls on an H100 cost about $1.33, plus the 5-second default idle timeout after each burst, and start-up time is billed too. There's no free tier and no data transfer fee. A default spend cap of $80 an hour covers all resources. Run flat out that's about $58,400 a month (my arithmetic), so it's a ceiling and not a budget. Volume disk is $0.10 running and $0.20 idle. Four, because the cap and the prepaid balance bound the loss, with billed start-up and a high default cap as the caveats.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A cent a credit, with the surcharges on the rate card”

One credit is $0.01, the first purchase is $10 minimum, it's prepaid, and there are no free generation credits. A 10 second Gen-4.5 clip is 120 credits, $1.20, so 1,000 cost $1,200. Gen-4 Turbo is $0.05 a second, $500 per 1,000 ten second clips. Aleph 2.0 is $0.28 a second with a 56 credit minimum, $0.56 a job. ProRes output adds 5 credits a second and HDR adds 20, which takes Gen-4.5 from $0.12 to $0.32 a second with HDR on. Resold models share the card, Veo 3.1 at $0.40 a second with audio and Seedance 2.0 up to $1.50 a second at 4K. Throughput follows spend tier, with a rolling 24-hour cap. Prices need no login. Credit expiry and refunds for failed tasks aren't covered in what I read. Four, for a plain, published rate card.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.116 per 1,000 on Hobby, with the surcharges published”

A data centre request is 1 credit, so Hobby ($29 for 250,000) works out at $0.116 per 1,000. Residential or mobile is 10 credits ($1.16 per 1,000), rendering 5 and both 25 ($2.90). About two dozen domains are forced up whatever you pass, google.* to 10, linkedin.com to 30 and sainsburys.co.uk to 200, which is $23.20 per 1,000 on Hobby, and the Scrape.do-Request-Cost header carries the authoritative figure. 429s, 502s and Scrape.do-side 400s aren't billed, but a 404, 410 or target 400 is. The free plan gives 1,000 successful credits a month with no card. There's no pay as you go, and annual billing is arranged through support. Four because the rate card is low and publishes its own surcharges, with billed dead URLs and a plan requirement as the caveats.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A $5 x402 pack, and docs that disagree on the free tier”

Markdown scrapes cost 1 credit and extractions 5, so Starter ($20 for 10,000) is $2 per 1,000 scrapes and $10 per 1,000 extractions. Growth ($100 for 100,000) halves the scrape rate to $1 and Pro ($500 for 750,000) gets it to $0.67. Top-up packs at $5 for 1,000 credits, $40 for 10,000 and $150 for 50,000 don't expire. An agent can buy a pack over x402 with 5 USDC and get a key back, which is $5 per 1,000 scrapes, 2.5 times the Starter rate. Per-call x402 runs through a third party, Orthogonal, whose prices live in a CLI. Failed requests aren't charged. The free allowance is 500 credits once on the pricing page and 500 a month in the docs. Three because the no-signup route costs a premium and the docs disagree on the free tier.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A tenfold price gap between llms.txt and the plan data”

The price list depends on which file you read. The plan data charged $1 per 1,000 for Google Search on Basic when checked on 30 September, while the site's llms.txt, the file agents read, quotes Deep SerpApi at $0.1 per 1,000. That's a tenfold gap in a machine-readable file. The rest of the card, Web Unlocker $1 per 1,000, Amazon $3, AI scrapers $1.80 to $2, cloud browser $0.09 an hour and residential proxy $1.80 a GB, renders client-side, so those figures come from the same 30 September check. Plans from $49 to $999 a month are prepaid and unused balance doesn't roll over. I found no statement on whether failed requests bill. crawl_start defaults to 10,000 pages with no limit set, and the cost of a crawled page isn't stated. Two because the agent-facing price sits tenfold below the plan data and the default crawl has no stated cost.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Hard caps on small plans, and cost_budget per request”

Discovery is $30 for 200,000 credits, so a data centre request is $0.15 per 1,000, residential $3.75 and a full-page screenshot (60 credits) $9.00. Browser rendering adds 5 credits, another $0.75 per 1,000. Free and Discovery stop at quota, which is a hard cap on spend, while Pro and above roll into pay as you go at $3.50 per 10,000 credits on Pro. The gap is the Unblocker, which adds per-target surcharges that aren't published and is on by default in the MCP web_scrape tool. cost_budget caps a single request, and every error code carries a billed flag. Failures are free under fair use until they pass 20 per cent of quota, when the terms allow charging or suspension. 1,000 free credits, no card. The 61-tool default list is a token cost I haven't seen counted. Four because spend can be capped per request and per plan, with the surcharges as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“10,000 free credits, and a 1 to 125 credit swing”

Ten thousand free credits a month with no card buy 10,000 plain requests or 1,000 on the default setting. The default is the catch, since headless Chrome costs 10 credits and a plain fetch 1, so Enthusiast ($19 for 100,000) is $1.90 per 1,000 by default and $0.19 with the browser off. Adding residential proxies takes a browser request to 125 credits, or $23.75 per 1,000 on Enthusiast, and the AI extractor adds 1 credit per 30 characters. Failed requests cost nothing and every response reports its spend in the Ant-credits-cost header. Separate proxy plans sell bandwidth at $3 to $6 a GB for residential. No x402. Four because failure is free and the cost is reported per call, with a 125-to-1 spread an agent has to set deliberately.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Five credits by default, one with rendering off”

Rendering is on by default, so a plain call costs 5 credits, $1.27 per 1,000 on Hobby ($19 for 75,000, excluding VAT). Set render_js to false and it's 1 credit, $0.25 per 1,000. Premium proxies run 10 or 25 credits and stealth 75, which is $19.00 per 1,000 on Hobby. mode=auto climbs through those tiers, bills only the one that works, and max_cost caps it, a real per-call spend limit. 400, 401, 413, 429 and 500 aren't billed, but a target 404 or 410 is. The trial is a one-off 1,000 credits with no card, and there's no monthly free tier. The vendor's own reference notes list nine conflicts in its docs, two of them credit costs. Four because the cap is real, with the 5-credit default and the documented conflicts as the caveats.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.20 per 1,000, if the model reads the right default”

Lite ($40 for 200,000 credits) puts a plain request at $0.20 per 1,000 and Standard ($90 for 1 million) at $0.09. Rendering is on by default at 5 credits, so a call that doesn't say otherwise costs $1.00 per 1,000 on Lite. The MCP's web_scrape tool describes the default as off, and since it omits unset parameters a model that trusts the description pays 5 times the plain rate. Premium proxies are 10 credits and both together 25. Failed requests aren't charged, there's no rollover or refund, and a public SLA page compensates downtime in credits. The free allowance is 100 credits on the pricing page and 200 requests a month in the docs. Three because the rate card is cheap and clear, but the tool a model reads misstates the default.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$8 per 1,000 minutes, $168 with the AI runtime”

A plain call is cheap. US local outbound is $0.008 a minute, $8.00 per 1,000 minutes, inbound $0.0066, SIP or WebRTC legs $0.003, numbers $0.50 a month and recording $0.002. The AI agent runtime is the line to watch. It's $0.16 a minute on top of call minutes and includes STT, LLM and standard TTS, so a five-minute AI call is $0.84, or $168.00 per 1,000 minutes. Telnyx lists $0.05 a minute for an assistant that also includes STT, LLM and TTS. New accounts start in trial mode with no card and need a card with at least $5 of credit to lift it, and an earlier claim of $5 in free credit couldn't be confirmed. Four because the call rates are low and published, and the AI runtime is steep but stated.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$7.80 per 1,000 US 10DLC texts, with carrier fees extra”

Sinch charges $0.0078 for a US message on 10DLC or toll-free and $0.009 on short code, the same rate inbound, plus carrier fees. 1,000 US 10DLC sends cost $7.80 before those fees, and I found no itemisation of them. Other countries and WhatsApp are priced through a country selector, so I can't quote them. The trial is 2 units of local currency (for example $2), a test number and up to 5 verified numbers, with no card, and $2 buys about 256 US sends at the 10DLC rate before carrier fees. The MCP has 54 tools, and I have no token count for loading them. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because the US rate is public and the trial is free, but carrier fees and every non-US price are out of reach of what I read.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$10 per 1,000 minutes, billed by the full minute”

Sinch bills in 60-second increments. US outbound is $0.01 a minute, $10.00 per 1,000 minutes, from a downloadable price list valid from 2026-09-26, so 1,000 calls of ten seconds cost the same $10.00 as 1,000 full minutes. Per-second billing at Vonage's $0.01446 would charge about $2.41 for those ten-second calls. The pricing page shows only illustrative figures, inbound $0.008 a minute and a number at $0.80 a month plus $0.80 setup, and tells the reader to check their dashboard, so the real rate sits behind an account. TTS, conferences and IVR menus carry no extra charge. The trial gives test credits and a test number for 2 weeks with no card. Three because the one real price is public and the rest are examples.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“About $1.70 per 1,000 minutes, and no free credit”

The rate card is public and low. Async audio is $1.50 per 1M tokens in and $3.50 per 1M for text, which Soniox puts at about $0.10 an hour, so 1,000 minutes comes to about $1.70. Real time is about $2.00 per 1,000 minutes. Diarisation, language ID and translation sit inside that price, where Speechmatics charges $10.80 per 1,000 minutes for translation alone. Two costs sit outside the number. New accounts have had no free credit since 2025-10-27, so the first test is paid for by a person with a funded account. And the hourly figure is Soniox's own conversion, because the bill follows tokens, not minutes. Per-request usage logs carry cost and request IDs. Four because the price is clear and the caveats are a funded account and a vendor estimate.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“About $11.70 per 1,000 minutes of speech, token-billed”

Soniox's speech output is token-billed at $4.00 per 1M input text tokens and $21.50 per 1M output audio tokens, which Soniox puts at about $0.70 an hour of speech, or $11.70 per 1,000 minutes. The stated ratios let me check it. An hour of audio is about 30,000 output tokens, which is $0.645 at the audio rate, so the remaining few cents is text and the estimate holds up. No free credit has been found for new accounts. Each request or stream stops at 2 minutes of audio and truncates past that, and billing for truncated or failed requests is unchecked, so I can't say whether a cut-off request is paid for in full. Three because the rate is low and checkable, but an unfunded account can't test it and the truncation rule is missing.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$300 a month for 1,000 songs, with a six-month minimum”

API Starter is $29.99 a month for up to 100 songs, about $0.30 a song at the cap, for new sign-ups at companies of up to 3 people. API Pro is $300 a month for up to 1,000 songs, also $0.30 a song, with a 6-month minimum, so the entry commitment is $1,800. Above that is a custom plan and a sales call. There's no per-call price and no public API docs, and access follows a sign-up or a call. A 50 to 70 per cent revenue share applies when end users resell downloaded tracks, which adds a cost per resale on top of the plan. Only successful generations count against the quota, per the listing's check. The help centre mentions a free 2-week trial, which I couldn't confirm or tie to a card. Two, because an agent can't find the price, try it or pay for it without a person, and $1,800 is the first commitment.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“The licence tier is a request field, and the default is the cheap one”

Soundverse prices by licence tier on each call. Song v7 is $0.12 royalty-free, $0.25 standard, $0.27 distribution, $0.67 sync and $1.67 for the master with full ownership, so 1,000 songs cost $120 at the bottom tier and $1,670 at the top. The license field defaults to 1, royalty-free, which doesn't cover sync or distribution, so an agent that omits it buys the wrong rights for $0.12. Instrumentals are $0.07, stem separation $0.10, sound effects $0.54 flat and a copyright check $0.03. A retry with the same Idempotency-Key isn't billed again. The wallet is funded by a person and there's no free tier. The pricing page didn't load in the research run, so the table rests on the listing's check of 2026-09-30. Four, with the default licence as the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Seven published rates and a pause at zero”

Seven prices are public, all per hour of audio and billed to the second. Batch Enhanced is $0.40, so $6.70 per 1,000 minutes. Realtime Enhanced is $7.20, Standard $4.00, Melia 1 $2.20 and Linden 1 $2.70, and translation adds $10.80. The $100 credit needs no card, and service pauses at zero until one is added, which is a cap an agent can't spend through. The default model is standard, and moving to Enhanced adds $2.70 per 1,000 minutes in batch. The 33 per cent discount comes only from opting in to model training, which turns the price into a data decision. Volume discount is 20 per cent over 500 hours a month per model. Four because the rates and the cap are plain, and one discount is tied to terms.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“About $0.50 per 1,000 scrapes, paid per call”

Bytes and CPU minutes set the bill. Credits are $1 per 10,000, metered as $1 per GB fetched plus $0.0001 per CPU minute, with no subscription and no expiry. The x402 estimates are $0.0005 a scrape ($0.50 per 1,000), $0.002 a search and $0.005 a crawl, and a probe by Anchor's research run on 30 September got a working 402 challenge. Keyless /scrape is free at 4 requests a minute, which is 5,760 a day. Zero data retention bills at 2.5 times. The contradiction is on failures, since the pricing page says they cost $0 and llms.txt says errored attempts are billed for the bytes and compute used. An unset crawl limit stops only at the credit balance. Four because the price travels with the request, but the failed-request rule needs reconciling.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A cent a credit, 25 free, and a one-year expiry”

Credits are $0.01 each, bought in $10 blocks. Stable Image Core is 3 credits ($30 per 1,000), SD 3.5 Flash 2.5 ($25 per 1,000), SD 3.5 Large 6.5 and Ultra 8 ($80 per 1,000). The upscalers are 2 credits (Fast), 40 (Conservative) and 60 (Creative), so $0.02, $0.40 and $0.60 a call. 25 free credits come with sign-up, and I couldn't tell whether they need a card. Credits bought under the current terms expire after a year, and a new terms version took effect on 30 September 2026 that I haven't seen. Some prices rose on 1 August 2025. The docs are a JavaScript app, so the dossier couldn't re-read prices this run and they rest on earlier research. Three, because the fixed per-call prices are good and the expiry and stale verification hold it back.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Twenty-six credits a generation, and failures cost nothing”

Stability sells credits at $0.01 each, $10 per 1,000. Stable Audio 3.0 is 26 credits, $0.26 a generation, so 1,000 tracks cost $260. Stable Audio 2.5 is a flat 20 credits ($0.20, $200 per 1,000) and 2.0 is 17 plus 0.06 a step, which is 20 at the default 50 steps. Failed generations aren't charged. The credits are prepaid, and whether an auto top-up exists is unchecked. Revenue above $1M a year needs an enterprise licence, and I found no price for it. No free credits for new accounts are documented. The pricing page still needs JavaScript, but the OpenAPI document confirmed these prices on 2 October, though the research behind this one is low confidence. Four, because the price is flat, public and free on failure, and the $1M cliff is the caveat.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.40 per 1,000 geocodes on Starter, at 20 credits each”

Credits set the price. A geocode, place lookup, Autocomplete v1 search or route is 20 credits, Autocomplete v2 is 1, a matrix element 10, a map tile 1 and a satellite tile 4. Starter is $20 a month for 1 million credits, which is 50,000 geocodes at $0.40 per 1,000, and overage is $0.03 per 1,000 credits, $0.60 per 1,000 geocodes. Standard is $80 for 7.5 million and Professional $250 for 25 million, with overage at $0.02 and $0.015. Autocomplete v2 costs a twentieth of a geocode. Free is 200,000 credits a month for development and demos only, so no commercial use. Storing geocodes needs Standard at $80. When credits run out the API returns 429 until the next cycle unless pay-as-you-go is on. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because every credit cost is public and the cap is hard by default, with free use and storage gated.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$7.50 to $8.50 per 1,000 US sends, and a price file an agent can read”

Telnyx lists US long code SMS at $0.004 a part, toll-free at $0.0055 and short code at $0.007, plus carrier passthrough of $0.0035 on AT&T and $0.0045 on Verizon and T-Mobile, so 1,000 single-part long code sends cost about $7.50 to $8.50. MMS is $0.015 outbound. Numbers are $1 a month, 10DLC is $4.50 for the brand and $10 a month for the campaign, and WhatsApp adds $0.004 a message to Meta's rate. The rates are also published as telnyx.com/pricing.md, 5,889 of them across 33 products. There's no free credit. An agent can fund the account by x402 (USDC on Base) or MPP, but those only top up credit rather than pay per message, per-payment limits aren't published, and the route is untested. Failed-send billing is unchecked. Four because the price is low and machine-readable, with no free credit and unpublished top-up limits.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$7 per 1,000 minutes, and an agent can fund it”

The price is in a pricing.md an agent can read, and the bill is a sum. US outbound is the Voice API fee of $0.002 plus $0.005 SIP termination, so $0.007 a minute or $7.00 per 1,000 minutes, and streaming adds $0.0035, so $10.50 with it. A five-minute streamed outbound call is about $0.053. AI Assistants and Conversation Relay are $0.05 a minute, and the assistant price includes STT, LLM and TTS. What I like is the funding path. A new account starts at zero with no free credit, and an agent can top it up with x402 in USDC on Base, MPP or ACP, no browser needed. Those are top-ups, not payment per call, per-payment limits aren't published and the 402 challenge wasn't tested. A command_id makes a retried call command a no-op instead of a second bill. Four because the pricing and funding are the best here and the spend limits aren't written down.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$39 per 1,000 images, with the price formula in Markdown”

Starter is $39 a month for 1,000 credits ($0.039 each), Scale $99 for 5,000 ($0.0198) and Enterprise $229 for 25,000 ($0.00916), or $29, $79 and $179 billed yearly. A 1-credit image therefore costs $39 per 1,000 at the bottom and $9.16 at the top on monthly billing. Video is width x height x fps x seconds / 50,000,000, so 10 seconds of 1080p at 30 fps is 13 credits, about $0.51 on Starter. The trial is 50 credits with no card, and rate limits are 60, 150 and 300 requests a minute by plan. Prices sit in a Markdown file. The MCP strips billing state from tool results, so the model can't read its own billing state there. Whether failed renders are charged isn't stated. Four because the rate card is machine-readable and one billing question is open.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Short rate card, free egress, two billing questions open”

Egress is free in every tier and region, and storage runs $0.02 a GB-month on Standard, $0.01 on Infrequent Access (30-day minimum, $0.01 a GB retrieval) and $0.004 on Archive (90-day minimum). Class A requests are $0.005 per 1,000 and Class B $0.0005 per 1,000, so 1,000 uploads cost $0.005 and 1,000 reads $0.0005. Deletes are free and object notifications are $0.01 per 1,000 events. Each month 5 GB, 10,000 Class A and 100,000 Class B requests are free, and storage is metered on the average daily peak over the month. The price list is public without a login. Whether signup asks for a card, and whether failed requests are billed, isn't established. Four because the rate card is short and public, with two billing details unchecked.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$12.31 to train a 27B LoRA, and idle costs $0”

Billing is per token on every step. A 3M-token LoRA job costs $1.19 on GPT-OSS-20B, $4.39 on Qwen3.5-9B, $12.31 on Qwen3.8-27B and $16.83 on Inkling, at $0.396 to $5.61 per million. An idle GPU costs $0. Sampling the result stays per token too, at $5.595 per million on Qwen3.8-27B, more than the $4.103 to train it. Prefill is $1.86 with cached prefill at 20% of that, and checkpoints cost $0.10 a GB-month until their TTL runs out. Prices are published as JSON in models.json with no login, and billing usage has shown estimated dollars since SDK 0.30.2. There's no free tier and a card comes before training. Standard-context prices rose on 17 July 2026, and I found no terms of service to say how failed work bills. Four because the billing is per token with machine-readable prices, held back by the July rise and the unreadable terms.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“A quote endpoint, then $5.49 an hour to serve”

Three million training tokens cost $4 on Llama 3.1 8B, because the minimum charge beats the $1.02 token bill, then $6.09 on Llama 3.3 70B, $21 on DeepSeek V3.1 and $60 on Kimi K2.6, where the $60 minimum beats a $45 token bill. DPO is 2.5 times SFT. The part I like is POST /v1/fine-tunes/estimate-price, a quote before the job runs. The part I don't is serving. A tuned model runs only on a dedicated endpoint, $5.49 an hour on an H100, which is $131.76 a day and $3,953 over 30 days, billed while idle, with H200 and B300 by quote. Access starts with a $5 prepaid purchase and there's no free trial. The docs say per-key spend caps don't exist. Cancelled-job billing isn't stated. Three because the estimate is good and the hosting bill is the real cost.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“20,000 free geocodes a month, and no paid rate I could read”

TomTom's free monthly allowance is public and needs no card. It's 20,000 Geocoding, 20,000 Reverse Geocoding, 20,000 Routing, 2,500 Search, 2,500 Matrix, 2,500 Traffic Incidents and 200,000 vector and raster tiles. Past that it's pay as you grow, priced in euros at volume tiers through an estimator on the pricing page, and I couldn't turn that into a per-1,000 rate. MCP billing isn't documented on the pages I read. The terms render client-side, so storage rules are unchecked. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Two because the free allowance is concrete but nothing past it can be priced from what I could read, and an agent that crosses the line has no price to plan against.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$11.80 to $13.30 per 1,000 US sends, and failed ones cost $0.001”

Twilio charges $0.0083 a US segment, outbound or inbound, plus carrier fees of $0.0035 on AT&T, $0.0045 on T-Mobile or $0.005 on Verizon, so 1,000 single-segment sends cost $11.80 to $13.30. MMS is $0.022 outbound. Failed messages cost $0.001 each, a figure I didn't find on the other messaging rate cards. Long code numbers are $1.15 a month and toll-free $2.15. WhatsApp is a $0.005 Twilio fee plus Meta's template fees, which are $0.0034 for a US utility or authentication template. Verify is $0.05 a successful verification plus channel fees. The trial is 30 days with 100 SMS and no card. 10DLC registration fees apply but aren't priced on the US SMS page. Four because the rate card is itemised and failed sends are priced, with the 10DLC fees missing.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$14 per 1,000 minutes, $84 with ConversationRelay”

Every price is on a public page. US outbound is $0.014 a minute, $14.00 per 1,000 minutes, inbound $0.0085 on local numbers or $0.022 toll-free, and numbers $1.15 a month. Media Streams add $0.0044 a minute, so $18.40 per 1,000 minutes, and ConversationRelay adds $0.07, so $84.00. That's about double Telnyx's all-in rate. Recording is $0.0025 a minute plus $0.0005 a minute a month in storage until someone deletes it, a charge that keeps running after the call. The trial needs no card and gives free units including 75 voice minutes for 30 days. There's no idempotency key on call creation, so a retry after a timeout can bill a second call unless the agent checks the Calls list first. Four because the rate card is complete and public, and the caveats are price and an unguarded retry.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Two cents per 1,000 calls, behind a waitlist”

Output is free and input is $0.042 per million tokens, so a 448-token call costs about 2 cents per 1,000 calls and a full 64,000-token request tops out near $0.0027. Clef-flash asks $0.09 for the same input. The rate card is public. Getting to it isn't. Jev is early access behind a waitlist, I found no free tier or credits, and whether approval brings any is unchecked. Credits bought under the Master Customer Agreement expire 12 months after purchase and aren't refunded on termination. No minimum top-up is recorded and nothing says whether failed calls are charged. At the published ceiling of 40 requests a second, 448-token calls would run about $2.71 an hour, though the limits can change without notice. No x402. Three because the price is low and the way in is a waitlist with expiring prepaid credit.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No per-search charge, but the cluster hour runs with no traffic”

Typesense Cloud bills a fixed hourly fee per dedicated cluster, set by RAM, vCPU, nodes and region, plus bandwidth at 9 to 12 cents a GB. There's no per-search or per-record charge, so 1,000 calls cost only their bandwidth on top of the cluster hour. The hourly rate sits behind a calculator, so I can't price a month, and the dedicated hardware bills whether or not it gets traffic. The free-tier cluster has 0.5 GB RAM, 2 vCPU burst and one node, with no payment method. Billing is weekly by card or from prepaid credit. The hosted MCP allows 300 data calls and 30 cluster actions a minute per connection. Self-hosted is GPL-3.0, free plus your servers. Three because the meter is flat and predictable once the cluster is chosen, but the rate is behind a calculator and an idle cluster costs money.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0 for the software, and the GPU is yours to price”

No account, no card and no seat fee, so the software costs $0. There's no hosted plan or price list either. The core is Apache-2.0, the Studio UI is AGPL-3.0, and both Docker images ship the AGPL code, which matters to a business that ships Studio rather than uses it. The bill is the GPU. The docs say 3 GB of VRAM is enough for small models, and a free Colab or Kaggle notebook covers those at $0. Larger models mean your own card or a rented one at someone else's rate, which I can't price from these pages. Nothing here is metered, so there's nothing inside the tool for an agent to run up. I couldn't establish what the exported get_statistics function sends, so $0 is the money cost only. Five because there's no meter to misread.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.004 per 1,000 requests, and a free plan with no card”

Pay as you go is $0.40 per 100,000 requests, which is $0.004 per 1,000 queries or upserts, so 1 million requests cost $4. Storage is $0.25 per GB a month and bandwidth is $0.03 per GB over 200 GB. The free plan is 10,000 requests a day, 1 GB and 1,536 dimensions with no card, and the $60 fixed plan covers 1M requests a day with 50 GB of data. Everything is public without a login. Pay as you go has no daily cap and I found no spend limit, so the ceiling is whatever the agent's loop reaches. Hosted embedding lets an agent upsert plain text, but the rate card I read doesn't price it, so that cost is unchecked. So is whether failed requests count, and what the daily cap returns. Four because the price per call is a single public line, with an uncapped plan and an unpriced embedding step left over.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$30 to tune Gemini 3.5 Flash, 1.5 times base to serve”

Tuning Gemini 3.5 Flash on 3M training tokens (dataset tokens times epochs) costs $30 for supervised or reinforcement tuning. Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite costs $9, Gemini 2.5 Pro $75, and Gemma 3 27B or Llama 3.3 70B about $20. The rate card is public. The meter that matters comes after, since from Gemini 3 on a tuned model costs 1.5 times the base model's prediction price for as long as it's served, so a busy tune can cost more to serve than it did to train. Whether an endpoint bills while idle is unchecked, and so is whether failed jobs are charged. There's no free tier for tuning, and a Cloud project with billing and a Storage bucket come before the first job. The quotas page publishes no quota for tuning jobs, and the 2.5 bases retire on 20 October. Three because the training price is clear and the serving price multiplies.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Off-peak halves the bill if the job can wait”

Credits cost $0.005 each, plus sales tax. Q3 Turbo at 720p is 11 credits a second, $0.055, so a 10 second clip is $0.55 and 1,000 clips cost $550. Off-peak mode roughly halves that to about $0.30 a clip, $300 per 1,000, for jobs that can wait up to 48 hours. Q3 Pro at 1080p is $0.12 a second, Q2 charges a start fee on top of a per-second rate, and Q1 is 80 credits a clip. No free credits are published, and the standard tier runs 5 concurrent tasks. Two caveats on my own reading. The research run couldn't load the pricing page, so these numbers rest on a check dated 30 September 2026, and nothing I read says whether failed tasks are charged. Three, because the rate card is cheap and public but I can't confirm it today.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.10 per 1,000 on Messenger, the rest behind a country selector”

Messenger is the one channel with a flat price, $0.0011 per delivered message, $1.10 per 1,000. SMS, MMS, RCS and WhatsApp rates vary by country and sit behind a country selector or a downloadable sheet, with no login, so I can't give a per-1,000 figure for a text without picking a market. Viber is custom. WhatsApp adds a Vonage platform fee to Meta's template fees, and that fee isn't quantified. New accounts get €2 of test credit with no card, a registered number plus 4 test numbers, and a demo notice on each SMS. The extras are priced, the Audit API at $550 a month and Auto-redact at $1,100, while HIPAA with a BAA is custom. Failed-send billing is unchecked. Three, because the rate card is public and readable, and the price of the commonest send still needs a country picked first.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Per-second billing at $14.46 per 1,000 minutes”

Vonage bills per second. US outbound is $0.01446 a minute, $14.46 per 1,000 minutes, and a websocket, SIP or in-app leg adds $0.00492, so a streamed outbound call comes to $19.38 per 1,000 minutes and a five-minute one to about $0.097. Inbound is $0.00495 on local numbers and $0.0154 toll-free. Because billing is per second, 1,000 ten-second calls cost about $2.41. The catch is where the prices live. The pricing page refused the research run's automated requests with a 403, so the rates come from a downloadable spreadsheet, and numbers are priced in euros (€1.81 a month) beside dollar call rates. Test credit is €2 with no card. Three because per-second billing is the kindest to short calls here, but a pricing page that blocks automated readers sends an agent to a spreadsheet.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$17 per 1,000 minutes, with brakes on expensive routes”

Voximplant's US outbound is $0.017 a minute, $17.00 per 1,000 minutes, inbound $0.005, and a number $1.50 a month plus $1.50 setup. Streaming is $0.004 a minute in 15-second increments. Voice AI connectors for OpenAI Realtime, Gemini Live and others are also $0.004 a minute, so a five-minute call through one is about $0.105 before the model's own fees, which are extra. Recording is $0.001 a minute to your own S3 or $0.0015 with 3 months of cloud storage. Two built-in brakes help a budget. Destinations above 20 cents a minute and calls to Africa are blocked until support lifts the block, and a session is capped at 50 call attempts and 10 unanswered calls at once. The gap is the trial. Signup is free, but no credit amount or card policy is stated. Three because the prices are published and the guards are real, and the first test has no stated cost.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No price list, and sandbox payment tests use a real card”

I can state one price for this API, $0 for sandbox calls once you hold a key, and that's all. No rates are published. Commission on completed stays sits in the affiliate agreement behind Partner Centre sign-in, so the contract can't be read before you sign, and I took a point off for that. The sandbox allows 50 requests a minute, only for Managed Affiliate Partners, and testing a booking with payment places temporary charges on a real card, cancelled every Monday. Production limits come from your account manager apart from cars search at 3,000 a minute, so a call budget can't be drawn up either. There's no x402 and no machine payment route. One because nothing in the public material lets an agent or an operator price 1,000 calls.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$18 to $45 per 1,000 calls, and six or seven models at $0”

The site's own examples price 1,000 calls of 2,000 tokens in and 500 out at $45 on Claude Fable 5.1 ($10/$50 per million) and $18 on GPT-5.6 Sol ($4/$20), billed at zero platform margin since 8 August. Paying from a Base wallet adds a flat $0.001 a call, $1 per 1,000, while Solana and the card route charge no fee. Six or seven models cost $0 (the repository says 6, llms.txt names 7), and a wallet costs nothing to create. Web search is $0.011, $11 per 1,000, and images run $15 to $100 per 1,000. The rate card needs no login. 400, 402, 429 and 5xx responses aren't charged, and settlement waits for a successful upstream response. No batch or prompt-caching discount. I can't tell how the 402 amount is fixed before the output length is known, or what the card route's minimum is. Four, for public prices and a $0 start, with those two gaps open.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“Fourteen to seventy dollars per thousand one-megapixel images”

FLUX.2 [klein] 4B starts at $0.014 an image, [klein] 9B at $0.015, [pro] at $0.03 ($0.045 for edits), [flex] at $0.05 and [max] at $0.07, all rising with output megapixels. That's roughly $14 to $70 per 1,000 one-megapixel images. FLUX.1 Kontext runs $0.04 to $0.08 and Fill $0.05. Credits are $0.01 each, prepaid, with auto top-up from $5, and the price is the same in the API and the Playground. No free credits are documented. The dossier has no statement on whether a request that ends as moderated is billed, so that is unchecked. Four, because the ladder lets an agent draft cheap and render dear, and the moderation billing question is the one gap.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$3.50 per 1,000 US texts before carrier fees, prepaid”

Bird sends US SMS at $0.0035 a segment on long code or toll-free and $0.007 on short code, plus carrier fees, so 1,000 single-segment sends cost $3.50 before fees. UK SMS is $0.05, $50 per 1,000. US WhatsApp is $0.0084 for utility and authentication messages and $0.03 for marketing, with Meta's fee included, and Meta gives 1,000 free service messages per business number a month from 1 October. US registration is $4.50 for the brand, $15 for vetting and $10 a month for most campaigns. Balance is prepaid, which caps the loss. There's no free SMS allowance, and I found no way to top up by API. Carrier fees aren't quantified. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Four because every rate is public and prepaid, with a person still needed to fund it.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“No price on the page, so the price is fal's $0.10”

Beatoven publishes no API price. The API page shows none, keys come from a dashboard or an email to hello@beatoven.ai where the team reviews the use case, and there's no free tier and no rate limit. Third-party sites quote $3 a minute for the web app, which I couldn't confirm. The only number I can stand behind is fal's, which sells the same maestro model at $0.10 a request, so 1,000 tracks cost $100 there. Nothing I read says whether failed compositions are charged, or whether track length changes the fal price, since length is set in the prompt text and not a parameter. Two, because an agent can't price a job on Beatoven's own endpoint, and the fal route does the same job with a price attached.

desk review: cost · failure · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.19 per 1,000 one-second calls on a 4090”

The Developer plan costs $0 with no card, and the meter runs per millisecond only while a container runs. 1,000 one-second calls on an RTX 4090 cost about $0.19 at $0.000192 a second, and each burst bills the 180-second keep-warm default for about $0.03 more. On an H100 PCIe at $3.50 an hour the same calls are about $0.97, plus roughly $0.18 of warm time. Cold starts and image pulls are free, though on_start is billed. A 100 ms task with a 300-second keep-warm costs about 301 seconds. Team is $89 a month and Growth is priced on request. Reserved machines bill until released, so a reserved H100 left up is $43.92 a day. Fees are non-refundable and credits expire on the date granted. Four because the rate card is public and cheap, and a forgotten reservation is the one trap.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$1.81 of GPU, then $1.62 of idle tail”

1,000 one-second calls on a warm H100 cost about $1.81 at $6.50 an hour. Then the default 900-second scale-down delay adds about $1.62 per burst, so one burst of that size costs $3.43, nearly double. Billing is per minute of replica time including start-up and idle, and nothing at zero replicas. Rates run from $0.63 an hour for a T4 to $9.98 for a B200, public with no login. Failed boots and image pulls aren't billed, while image builds and model loading are. New workspaces get credits with no card until they run out, at which point models deactivate. Basic is $0 a month, and Pro and Enterprise add volume discounts. Setting scale_down_delay lower is the fix. Three because the default idle tail bills as much as the work, and an unsupervised agent will pay it without noticing.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$0.049 an image, until formats and scale multiply it”

One image is 1 credit per format and scale step, so a single jpg at scale 1 costs $0.049 on Automate ($49 for 1,000 credits), $0.0149 on Scale ($149 for 10,000) and $0.00598 on Enterprise ($299 for 50,000). Ask for jpg plus png at scale 2 and the same image costs 4 credits, $196 per 1,000 on Automate. Animations are 2 credits a second and media tools 1 to 4 credits. Over-quota requests get a 402 and aren't billed, and failed tool jobs haven't been charged since 9 September 2026. The trial is 30 credits with no card. Audit logs and zero retention sit on the $299 plan. Four because the rate card is public and overage is refused, and a model that chooses formats freely can quadruple its own bill.

desk review: cost · success · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$10 per 1,000 minutes, with numbers and SIP behind sales”

US local outbound is $0.01 a minute, $10.00 per 1,000 minutes, or $14.00 with bidirectional streaming at $0.004. Inbound is $0.0055 and recording $0.002. A five-minute streamed outbound call comes to about $0.07. The Build trial gives 3,000 credits, a US number and no card, limited to the US and Canada, 5 concurrent calls and 30 minutes a call. The gap is what surrounds the call. Number rental and SIP trunking are quoted by sales, so the monthly cost of owning a number isn't on any page the research run read. Failed-call billing is unchecked. Three because the call rates are public and low, and a sales call stands between an agent and the rest of its bill.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$4 per 1,000 US 10DLC texts, behind a sales call”

A US 10DLC text is $0.004, so 1,000 sends cost $4 before carrier fees. MMS is $0.015. Toll-free is $0.007 for SMS and $0.020 for MMS, and short code is $0.008 and $0.020. Those rates are public, but nothing else is self-serve. Messaging accounts are set up through sales, number rental is quoted by sales, and the free Build trial of 3,000 credits covers voice and SIP only, so there's no free messaging at all. The carrier fees on top aren't quantified in what I read. Failed-call billing is unchecked. An agent can't sign up and start spending without a person. Three because the per-message rates are low and public, but the account and the number rental both need a sales conversation.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$6.95 a TB-month and nothing per call”

$6.95 a TB-month, so 1 TB stored is $6.95 and the first 10 GB are free. Class A, B and C calls cost $0 per 1,000, Class D is $0.004 per 10,000 after 2,500 a day free, and there's no minimum file size or storage duration. Egress is free up to three times the average data stored, then $0.01 a GB, so 1 TB stored and 5 TB read out costs $26.95. It's free to Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net and other partners. Signup asks for no card and every price is public. The full 40-tool MCP server carries 49,500 characters of input schema, roughly 12,400 tokens at four characters a token (my estimate), and a read-only key trims that to 15,400. Five because the price list is short, public and cheap, and the only open item is whether failed calls count.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$10 per million characters, until a request picks the LLM”

East US pay as you go is $10 per million characters for text, $15 for documents and $40 for custom-model translation, so 1,000 calls of 1,000 characters cost $10. Custom training is $10 per million, and each hosted custom model is $10 a month per region. Commitment tiers are $2,055 a month for 250 million characters ($8.22 per million over), $6,000 for 1 billion ($6) and $22,000 for 4 billion ($5.50). F0 is free for 2 million characters a month and needs a card. Since API version 2026-06-06 each request can pick an LLM, which bills input and output tokens at Azure OpenAI rates instead of characters, and those rates aren't in what I read. The pricing page needs JavaScript, so the figures come from the Azure Retail Prices API. Other regions and failed-call billing are unchecked. Three because the character price is public and low, while the LLM option swaps the meter to one I can't price.

desk review: cost · partial · Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made.

“$15 per 1M characters, with a card even for free”

Neural and Neural HD Flash voices are $15 per 1M characters in East US and Neural HD is $22, real time or batch. A commitment tier from $960 a month buys 80M characters, which is $12 per 1M and cheaper than pay as you go once monthly volume passes 64M, with overage at $12. The F0 tier gives 500,000 characters a month, but an Azure subscription needs a card even for it. The pricing page needs JavaScript, so the readable source is the Retail Prices API, which an agent has to know to look for. Custom and personal voices are limited access and priced separately, so I haven't priced them. Three because the numbers are good once found, but the page hides them from a plain reader and the free tier is card-gated.