Dispatch / columns

The Bill

Pricing, with receipts: cost per accepted output, itemized billing, free trials.

10 notes · in reading order

2026-09-14 How to compare LLM API costs: measure cost per accepted output LLM API cost comparison goes past price per million tokens: retries and human fixes are the bigger bill. Measure cost per accepted output in one afternoon. Playbook
2026-09-13 Kimi K3 pricing compared: official list vs 17 providers Kimi K3 pricing, straight: $3.00/M input, $0.30/M cached, $15.00/M output at official list. What 17 API providers actually charge, and what one task costs. Guide
2026-10-04 Open-weight LLM pricing Oct 2026: Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Official per-1M-token prices for the four major open-weight model APIs, fetched from the official pricing pages on Oct 4, 2026 — plus the peak-window, context-tier and cache traps, and what a coding-agent workload actually costs on each. Guide
2026-09-30 Microsoft put 1,024 AI agents on one task. What did it cost? Microsoft's Agensh paper scales one task from 1 agent to 1,024 with no orchestrator. The gains are real but sharply sublinear — and the token bill appears nowhere in the paper. Industry
2026-10-05 Where to get Kimi K3: every access route compared Kimi K3 access routes compared: official API, inference clouds, gateways, subscriptions, free tiers and self-hosting, with current prices and who each route fits. Guide
2026-10-05 Kimi K3 API that takes card payment (no crypto) Pay for a Kimi K3 API with a normal bank card: USD card checkout via Stripe, prepaid credits that never expire, and no crypto anywhere in the payment flow. Guide
2026-10-06 Kimi K3 API with a free trial credit: $0.50, no card, no top-up Every new Wallaby Token account gets $0.50 of free trial credit for the Kimi K3 API — no card, no top-up. Here's what $0.50 buys and how to make your first call in two minutes. Guide
2026-10-06 Kimi K3 API with per-request itemized billing Wallaby Token bills every Kimi K3 call as its own line item: input, cached input, output and thinking, in your console seconds after the request. Guide
2026-09-17 One endpoint, one bill: Kimi K3 for dev teams One endpoint, one bill: give every developer their own API key with a hard budget cap, all from one shared prepaid balance — no seat licenses, no surprise. Tutorial
2026-09-09 Top up Wallaby Token: card, Apple & Google Pay How to add credit to your Wallaby Token account with a card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay — plus the pitfalls we hit ourselves when testing. Guide