Quick disclosure: we run Wallaby Token, an API gateway selling access to open-weight models. This post explains why the company exists. You deserve to know our incentive before our pitch.
The problem we kept hitting
Frontier open-weight models are good enough to build real products on. Buying access to them is still harder than it should be. If you're a developer who wants Kimi K3 in your coding tool today, your options are a provider account whose billing may not take your card — or a reseller that marks up tokens and shows you a balance going down with no explanation.
We wanted a third option: one prepaid USD key, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and a bill you can actually read. It didn't exist, so we built it.
What we run
One key. Prepaid USD. Per-token metering. If your tool speaks to api.openai.com, it speaks to us — change the base URL and keep working:
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://api.wallabytoken.com/v1",
api_key="sk-...",
)
Pricing: Kimi K3, live now
| Input | Cache hit | Output | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official list | $3.00 | $0.30 | $15.00 | per 1M tokens |
| Wallaby | $2.70 | $0.27 | $13.50 | through Oct 31, 2026 |
| After launch window | $2.85 | $0.285 | $14.25 | 5% off list, ongoing |
No purchase fee, no minimum beyond a $20 first top-up. The price on the page is the price you pay.
Why you can trust a small provider
Skepticism toward small API resellers is healthy, so we put the receipts up front:
- Live status page, public since day one: status.wallabytoken.com
- Plain-English terms, AUP, and refund policy — written down, not improvised over email
- Registered company: Wallaby Data Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia (ABN on every page footer)
- We dogfood: our release radar and the pipeline behind this blog run through the same gateway and metering you use. If our billing is wrong, we feel it first
How we're different from a typical reseller
- The receipt is the product. Every call is itemised: tokens in, tokens out, unit price, total. When a coding agent burns a long session, you can answer "what did that cost me?" in seconds.
- Open-weight models only. Not because closed models aren't good, but because open weights are where your investment can't be revoked by a terms-of-service change — and where a small, focused provider adds real value.
- We don't chase model hype. The catalog stays short: frontier open-weight models we've actually run in production ourselves. No landing pages for models we haven't tested.
Where we're going
- More frontier open models, fast. When a model worth carrying drops, the goal is live-in-48-hours with real numbers — not a waitlist.
- Field notes. This blog publishes what we measure: cross-provider pricing, smoke-test results, honest caveats. Numbers over adjectives.
- Boring reliability. Uptime, auditable metering, support that answers. The unglamorous work that makes an API provider worth paying.
We're early, and some of this is still being built — we'd rather say so than fake it.
Try it: grab a key. New accounts get $0.50 of free credit, and your first call shows up as an itemised receipt within seconds. That's the whole pitch.
— The Wallaby team, Sydney