Costs & Credits

Understand Peerwave's unique economic model where users pay directly for the services they consume. Developers build without hosting costs while users control their spending.

How Peerwave Pricing Works

Peerwave operates on a unique economic model where users directly pay for the services they consume through credits. Each request is a micro-transaction with different costs based on the complexity and resources required.

This means developers don't have to bear any hosting costs to share their applications with the world. Users pay directly for what they use, creating a fair and sustainable ecosystem.

Key Benefits: Developers can focus on building great applications without worrying about infrastructure costs, while users have transparent pricing and control over their spending.

Tracking request costs for Chat

The cost of a request is determined after it is completed and depends on the number of tokens processed in the request. A token is essentially part of a word. The cost per token can always be found via the Cost-Per-Unit header.

Non-Streaming Responses

For regular API calls, the total cost of the request is available in the Credits header of the response.

Try Request with Credits Tracking

fetch("https://api.peerwave.ai/api/chat", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "Redirect": window.location.pathname + "?codeblock=credits-tracking"
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
  "model": "cheapest",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Hello! How much did this cost?"
    }
  ]
})
}).then((response) => {
  // Get the cost from response headers
  const creditsUsed = response.headers.get("Credits");
  console.log(`This request cost ${creditsUsed} credits`);
  
  return response.json();
})

Streaming Responses

For streaming responses, the total cost of the request is included in the final message of the stream.

Credits in Streaming Response

// During streaming, the final message contains cost information
{"message":{"role":"assistant","content":"?"},"done":true,"done_reason":"stop"}
{"model":"llama3.1:8b","credits":256}

Benefits for Developers

As a result of this model, developers are in control of how much users spend on their applications. This creates a balanced set of incentives:

No hosting costs - Build and deploy without infrastructure expenses
Efficiency incentives - Users prefer cost-effective applications, encouraging optimization
Quality differentiation - Premium features can justify higher costs
User choice - Users decide what works for them based on value

Future: Developer Revenue Sharing

The promise of Peerwave is a reasonable economic model where developers get paid for the services they provide. We believe developers building applications should be compensated when people use their work.

Soon, we will allow developers to charge a fee in credits for every request made through their application. This feature isn't currently available, but is coming soon.

Coming Soon: Developer fee system that allows you to earn credits when users interact with your applications, creating sustainable revenue streams for application developers.