Pika API by Pika (Mellis, Inc.)

# Fix list: Pika API

From Anchor Terminal's listing at https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pika, the October 2026 research run, assessed 1 October 2026. Grade D, 47.8 out of 100.

This is everything the published grade says the listing lacks, the biggest possible gain to the total first. It comes from the reason given for each score, the checklist each category was scored against (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist), the provenance checks, the deductions, what we couldn't check and what the review panel asked for. A fix counts at the next check, once it's public.

For a coding agent working on Pika API: work through the items below in the product, its docs and its public pages. Each category gives the reason for its score, with the points each checklist item earned, and the checklist itself, so the gap is the items that earned less than their points. Change the product, not the wording, and keep a note of what you changed and where it's published.

## 1. Reliability, 35 out of 100, up to 13 more on the total

Why it scored 35: No status page. The homepage makes an uptime claim but links no status page (0). No incident history to read (5). The docs name per-minute and per-day request limits and a queue cap without numbers (5). A 429 covers both rate limit and full queue and comes with Retry-After to honour, and submits take an Idempotency-Key, so retries are safe (15). No SLA published (0). Launched on 4 August 2026 with no beta label (10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-reliability):

Hosted APIs, MCP servers, models and platforms.

- 20, a public status page with component history (Statuspage, Instatus, BetterStack or the vendor's own).
- 0 to 30, the incident record for the last 90 days on that page. 30 for a clean record or trivial incidents only, 20 for minor incidents only, 10 for one major outage (an hour or more of a core API down, or errors across the board), 0 for several. 5 when there's no history we could read, and the note says so.
- 15, rate limits documented with numbers.
- 15, documented 429 or overload handling (Retry-After, backoff guidance), and idempotency keys or safe-retry guidance where writes are involved.
- 10, an SLA published for any paid tier.
- 10, the surface agents use is generally available, not beta or preview.

Local packages, SDKs, frameworks and stdio MCP servers.

- 20, installs from an official package with supported runtimes stated.
- 25, a public CI and test suite, passing on the default branch.
- 0 to 25, open crash or regression issues relative to activity (25 for few and handled, 0 for many, old and unanswered).
- 15, semver discipline and breaking changes called out in a changelog.
- 15, version 1.0 or later, or declared stable.

Protocols are read from their reference implementations, the public facilitators or servers, spec stability and test vectors.

## 2. Security & auth, 33 out of 100, up to 11.7 more on the total

Why it scored 33: Model reading of the checklist (credential, training, retention, operator visibility, programme). API keys created at dev.pika.art/keys, sent as X-API-Key or bearer, and an inactive key is refused. No scopes found (20). The terms of 4 August 2026 let Pika use anonymised or aggregated inputs and outputs to train its models, with no opt-out stated (0). Deleting a job erases its stored media and the captured prompt (5). No retention period stated for jobs you don't delete (0). A balance endpoint, a settled charge per job and a webhook delivery log, no audit log (8). No security.txt, bug bounty or certification found (0).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-security):

- 0 to 30, the credential model. 30 for OAuth 2.1 with scopes, or scoped and revocable keys with rotation. 20 for plain revocable API keys. 10 for one all-powerful key. 10 off when a secret can travel in a URL query string as a documented option.
- 0 to 20, read-only or least-privilege modes, and confirmation or approval for destructive actions.
- 0 to 15, prompt-injection posture where the tool returns untrusted content (documented mitigations or guidance). A tool that returns no untrusted content gets 10.
- 0 to 15, audit logs or per-call visibility for the operator.
- 0 to 20, a security programme. security.txt or a disclosure policy, a bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001, advisories handled in public.

Models are read for retention, whether API data trains models (and whether that's off by default), zero-retention options and certifications. Frameworks for telemetry defaults, approval hooks, guardrails and sandboxing.

## 3. Payments & pricing, 20 out of 100, up to 10 more on the total

Why it scored 20: No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Live per-operation prices from a keyless catalogue, and quotes are free and need no key, $0.04 a second for Pika 2.5 at 720p (20). No free generation tier. The $10 monthly membership includes a $10 credit in the first month but needs a card (0). Browsing and quoting are keyless, but generating needs a person to sign up and pay (0).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-payments):

The published rubric, also on the [x402 page](https://www.anchorterminal.com/x402/).

- 40, a machine payment protocol (x402, MPP or L402) on the tool's own endpoints. 10 to 30 when it covers only some endpoints or only goes through a third party, and the note says which.
- 20, per-call or per-unit pricing published without a login. 10 for public plan-only pricing, 0 for "contact sales" or prices behind a login.
- 20, a free tier or trial that doesn't need a card.
- 20, autonomous onboarding, meaning an agent can get access without a person signing up in a browser (keyless use, x402, a programmatic key API).

Payment platforms and agent wallets rarely charge for their own API over a machine protocol, so the first line has steps for them, and the highest one that applies counts. 40 when x402, MPP or L402 runs on all their own endpoints, 30 when it runs on part of their own API, 25 when their merchants can accept one, 20 for running a facilitator, 15 for paying as a buyer, and 0 when the only protocol is their own. Merchant acceptance sits above a facilitator because the platform's own customers can charge agents through it, while a facilitator settles for sellers who wire up the protocol themselves. The counter-argument (a facilitator does more for the protocol as a whole) has a point. Each note says which step applied.

Open-source software you run yourself is scored on its hosted or paid option if it has one. A free, self-hosted package with nothing to buy gets 20, 20 and 20 for the last three lines, and 0 to 40 for the first only if it ships a payment protocol.

## 4. Maintenance & community, 20 out of 100, up to 7 more on the total

Why it scored 20: Model reading. The API launched on 4 August 2026, 58 days ago, and the terms were updated the same day. We found no dated change since (20). Too new for a deprecation record, and no policy found (0). No changelog or public support channel found (0). No official SDK (0). Nothing to assess for package health (0).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-maintenance):

- 0 to 30, time since the last release, or the last published model or API change for a closed service. 30 within 30 days, 20 within 90, 10 within 180, 0 older.
- 20, at least three releases or dated changelog entries in the last 90 days.
- 0 to 25, responsiveness. Issues and pull requests answered on GitHub (the open issues and how recent the replies are). For closed services, a public changelog and a support or community channel that answers, 0 to 15.
- 15, presence in the official MCP registry under a verified namespace (MCP servers), or current official SDKs (APIs and models).
- 10, package health, current dependencies and CI.

Models are read for deprecation notice periods and model churn rather than release counts.

## 5. Transparency & trust, 49 out of 100, up to 4.5 more on the total

Made of editorial 35, provenance 62.

Why it scored 49: Closed service. The terms assign outputs to the customer, with commercial use set by plan (15). The terms state the training use and that deletion removes media and prompts (10). No retention period, and we didn't read the privacy policy against the terms (0). No deprecation policy found (0). Each operation names the upstream vendor that runs it and applies that vendor's moderation, so you know which third party sees each request. No formal subprocessor list or data locations (10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-transparency):

- 0 to 30, source availability and licence clarity. 30 for open source under an OSI licence, 15 for closed with clear terms, 0 for unclear terms.
- 0 to 30, data handling and retention statements that agree with each other (privacy policy, DPA, retention periods, subprocessors).
- 0 to 20, a deprecation policy or notices with dates.
- 0 to 20, telemetry disclosed with an opt-out (local software), or subprocessors and data locations disclosed (hosted).

The other half of Transparency and trust is the provenance score, computed from checked facts (below). The category score is the mean of the two.

Provenance checks not met in full (half of this category, computed from checked facts):

- Domain age: pika.art, registered 2023-06-29 (3 years) (7 of 15)
- Status page: not found (0 of 10)
- Changelog: not found (0 of 10)
- security.txt: not found (0 of 10)

## 6. Agent ergonomics, 80 out of 100, up to 3.3 more on the total

Why it scored 80: Jobs are small JSON objects with media by URL, and signed webhooks (Standard Webhooks, retried for about 55 hours) remove polling (25). Resolution and duration control output size (10). No job list endpoint found, only a list of webhook deliveries (0 of 10). Errors say what to do, for example check the balance on a 403 and send a fresh key on a 409 (20). Idempotency-Key on submits, and a reused key with a different body returns 409 (20). Few required fields, but no official SDK (5).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-ergonomics):

- 0 to 25, context cost. For MCP, the number and size of the tool definitions (25 for ten or fewer compact tools, 15 for 11 to 30, 5 for more than 30, plus up to 10 back for toolsets, dynamic loading or read-only subsets). For APIs, whether responses can be sized (field selection, limits, summaries).
- 20, pagination, filtering and output-size controls.
- 20, actionable, documented error responses, codes and messages an agent can recover from.
- 20, idempotency or safe retries, and for MCP the `readOnlyHint` and `destructiveHint` annotations.
- 15, sensible defaults, few required parameters, and official SDKs in at least two languages.

Models are read for tool use, structured output, prompt caching, context length, batch and SDKs. Frameworks for how much code and how many defaults a tool-calling agent with MCP needs.

## 7. Schema & documentation, 83 out of 100, up to 2.8 more on the total

Why it scored 83: OpenAPI 3.1 at dev.pika.art/openapi.json, and the keyless catalogue returns a JSON input schema for every one of its 162 operations (25). A detailed llms.txt (10). llms.txt walks through discovery, quote, submit, poll and webhooks, but per-model guidance on when to use which of the 162 operations is thin (15). Typed input schemas per operation from the catalogue, with prices quoted before you submit (13). Error codes 401, 403, 409, 413, 415, 422, 429 and 503 are each explained with the action to take, and the docs carry request examples (15). Versioned /v1 paths, but no changelog (5).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-schema):

APIs and MCP servers.

- 25, a machine-readable contract (a public OpenAPI file or similar; for MCP, typed JSON Schema inputs on every tool).
- 10, llms.txt or Markdown docs served for agents.
- 0 to 20, descriptions that say what a tool is for, when to use it and when not to, read from the tool definitions in the source or the API reference.
- 0 to 15, typed inputs with enums, constraints and required fields, and no free-form JSON blobs.
- 0 to 15, examples and documented error responses.
- 15, versioning and a public changelog.

Models are read from the API reference, the OpenAPI file, llms.txt, the structured-output and tool-use docs and the model cards. Frameworks from docs a model can follow, typed interfaces, examples and the API reference.

## What we couldn't check

What we couldn't read counted as absent. Publishing it on a page a plain HTTP fetch can read (not only in a browser) lets the next check count it.

- What the privacy policy says about retention and training. We read only the terms
- Whether the anonymised-data training clause covers inputs sent to resold third-party models
- Whether any change since launch has been announced anywhere, with no changelog to check

## Weaknesses

- $10 a month membership before any usage, and no free generation
- No status page, changelog or official SDK
- Terms allow training on anonymised or aggregated inputs and outputs
- Rate limits described but no numbers published
- Launched on 2026-08-04, so there's little track record

## What costs an agent a turn today

The notes we give agents before they call it. Each one is a workaround an agent shouldn't need.

- Call `GET /catalog/apis/{api_id}?expand=inputs` first. It's free and returns the path, schema and price
- Check GET /billing/balance before a submit. A 403 can mean an inactive key or an empty balance
- Send an Idempotency-Key on every submit, and a fresh one only when you change the body
- Record cost from `billing.charge_micro_usd` only once `billing.state` is settled

## What the review panel asked for

- Status page
- Job list endpoint
- State failed-job charge policy

## When it's done

Send what changed and where it's published as a dispute (https://www.anchorterminal.com/builders/#disputes, or `POST https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/contact` with `"kind": "dispute"`). Disputes are answered in public, and the listing is checked again by the same checklist. Paying for an audit or a listing claim changes nothing here.