Per-job pricing. Same rate, every job.
No instances, no commitments, no sales call. Every route lists the model, the OpenAI comparable, and what you pay. Beta routes show estimates — they lock at GA.
Whisper, three weights.
All three accept the same request shape — change the model name and the rest of your code is unchanged. Sub-second clip latencies on whisper-turbo, OpenAI-grade accuracy on whisper-large-v3.
| Model | Tuned for | WER | p50 latency | OpenAI | Acorn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| whisper-large-v3most accurate · default | Interviews, podcasts, noisy audio | 5.4% | 2.1s | $0.0060 / min | $0.0012 / min | Available |
| whisper-medium5× throughput | Clean meetings, voicemail, captions | 7.8% | 0.9s | — | $0.0006 / min | Available |
| whisper-turbolowest latency | Clip-length audio · ≤30s segments | 6.9% | 0.4s | — | $0.0009 / min | Available |
Beta pricing locks at GA.
Embeddings, image generation, and async text generation are in private beta. Pricing shown is the estimate we expect to lock at GA — beta accounts pay nothing today.
| Route & model | OpenAI | Acorn (est.) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| bge-large-en-v1.5POST /v1/embeddings · retrieval / RAG | $0.020 / M tok | $0.012 / M tok | Beta |
| gte-largePOST /v1/embeddings · multilingual | — | $0.014 / M tok | Beta |
| flux.1-schnellPOST /v1/images/generations · 1024×1024 | — | $0.004 / image | Beta |
| flux.1-devPOST /v1/images/generations · 1024×1024 | — | $0.012 / image | Beta |
| sdxl-turboPOST /v1/images/generations · 1024×1024 · fastest | — | $0.0012 / image | Beta |
| llama-3.1-70b-instructPOST /v1/chat/completions · async batch | $0.40 / M in · $0.40 / M out | $0.10 / M in · $0.14 / M out | Beta |
| qwen-2.5-32b-instructPOST /v1/chat/completions · async batch | — | $0.05 / M in · $0.08 / M out | Beta |
| mistral-small-3POST /v1/chat/completions · async batch | — | $0.03 / M in · $0.06 / M out | Beta |
| byo-mlxPOST /v1/batch · bring your own checkpoint | — | talk to us | Planned · Q4 |
Discounts at volume. No contracts.
If you cross a threshold inside a calendar month, the discount applies retroactively to that month's usage. Cross it again next month and you stay tiered. No annual commit, no renegotiation.
| Tier | Monthly spend | Discount | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freefirst 100 hrs of audio every month, forever | $0 | — | Email support · community Discord |
| Builddefault · pay-as-you-go | $0 – $499 | — | Email support · usage dashboard · signed webhooks |
| Scaleautomatic when you cross the threshold | $500 – $4,999 | −10% | Slack shared channel · region pinning · 99.9% SLA |
| Enterprisetalk to us · SOC 2 evidence on request | $5,000+ | −20% | Dedicated worker pools · DPA · annual invoicing · 99.95% SLA |
Every account, every tier.
SOC 2 Type II.
Annual report shared with any enterprise prospect under NDA. Penetration tests published quarterly.
Per-region pinning.
US-East, US-West, EU-Central. Pin a partner key to a region and every job stays inside it — at attestation, in transit, on disk.
Signed webhooks.
HMAC-SHA256 over timestamp and raw body. Replayable for 30 days. At-least-once with exponential backoff and a dead-letter queue.
Billing, on the record.
How is usage billed?
Per-minute of audio for transcription, per-token for embeddings and chat, per-image for image generation. We meter at the worker, settle daily, and invoice at the end of the calendar month. Volume tier is computed monthly from total spend and applied to that month's bill.
What about failed jobs?
We don't bill for failures we caused (worker crash, model load error, dispatch timeout). The billed: false flag on the error response is authoritative. Failures caused by malformed input (4xx) are billed at the duration of compute consumed.
Do you bill for the OpenAI-compatible streaming endpoints?
We don't ship streaming endpoints. Streaming is a chat-UI pattern; Acorn is for async batch work. If your code calls stream=true, we'll return a non-streaming response with the full payload at the end. Bill is the same.
Annual contract option?
Yes, on Enterprise. The discount is the same as month-to-month spend at the same tier — the annual is purely an invoicing convenience. We don't lock you into volume you don't use.
What currency? Do you collect VAT / GST?
USD. EU customers can be billed in EUR with reverse-charge VAT on invoice; UK customers in GBP with VAT. We're registered in the US, the EU (IE), and the UK.
What happens to my $25 starter credit?
It's a credit balance, not a recurring grant. It applies to your first paid usage automatically. The 100 hr/month free tier renews monthly on top of any remaining starter credit.
The right number is the one you don't have to guess.
Your $25 starter credit lands at sign-up. The free tier covers most integration work before you commit. No card, no demo call.