LLM API Pricing: 6 Costs the Rate Card Does Not Show
Cache asymmetry, peak-hour billing, context cliffs, uncounted reasoning tokens, platform fees, subscription math, and where each model's rate lives.
Seedance API: Every Tier, Price, and Failure Mode (2026)
Which Seedance model to call, what each resolution costs per second, the async contract that trips people up, and the failure modes on every tier.
GLM-5.3-Flash Has Three Parameter Counts. Only One Decides Your Bill.
320B total, 18B active, 45 layers. Each number answers a different question, and the loudest thread on r/LocalLLaMA argued about the wrong one.
GLM-5.3-Flash vs DeepSeek V4 Flash: Neither One Has a Single Price
DeepSeek's rate doubles for 21% of the week. GLM's discount has an expiry. The winner depends on your cache-hit rate and your clock.
Seedance 2.5 Pricing: Audit Any Provider With ByteDance's Own Formula
ByteDance publishes the token formula behind every Seedance 2.5 price. Divide a provider's rate by it and you get their markup: Replicate 1.00x, fal 2.05x.
AI Video API Cost in 2026: List Price vs Usable-Clip Cost
Per-second rates are the smallest term in a video bill. Attempts per usable clip went from 2-3 to 7-8 this year.
Faceless YouTube Channel Automation: $0.30 per Short, Start to Finish
One key, four steps: script model, three 5-second clips, ffmpeg concat. 15 seconds of vertical video for $0.3009 in 260 seconds, and 3 parts that break.
Seedance 2.5 Image-to-Video: First and Last Frame Control (2026)
Send both ends and Seedance 2.5 lands on them: closing-frame error 5.4 against 35.9 for 2.0 Mini. Setting aspect_ratio is a 400. Billed $0.11/s at 480p.
"Transparent Background Is Not Supported for This Model": 3 Fixes
gpt-image-2 returns this 400 while gpt-image-1.5 returns a real RGBA PNG. Five image models on one endpoint: one works, one errors, three return opaque.
Video Generation API Polling: 202, polling_url, Wait Times (2026)
POST returns 202 in 0.8s, then nothing for 83 to 253 seconds. Eight identical 5s jobs, a 3x spread. Cancel fails once it runs, and the URL dies in 24h.