Unbiased
Glossary
The vocabulary of LLM pricing and infrastructure, defined with measured data instead of adjectives. Every term links to the receipts behind it.
MTok pricing
MTok pricing is the industry-standard billing unit for LLM APIs: dollars per million tokens, quoted separately for input (your prompt and context) and output (the model's response).
Prompt caching
Prompt caching lets an LLM API reuse previously processed context instead of recomputing it, billing cached input at a fraction of the normal rate: about 10% on Anthropic, and a 90% read discount with a 1.25x write premium on OpenAI.
Batch API
A Batch API accepts jobs asynchronously, typically completing within hours instead of seconds, in exchange for a 50% discount on both input and output tokens.
LLM gateway
An LLM gateway is a layer between applications and model providers that exposes one API surface, usually OpenAI-compatible, for many models.
BYOK
Bring Your Own Key means using a gateway's interface while authenticating with your own provider API keys, so providers bill you directly and the gateway never holds your balance.
Blended model
A blended model is a system that engages multiple underlying LLMs on each request and synthesizes the result dynamically, presented to the caller as a single model with one API surface.
Silent quality regression
A silent quality regression is a drop in model output quality that arrives without an announcement, version change, or price signal, typically when a provider changes serving infrastructure, quantization, or backend routing.
Shadow mode
Shadow mode runs a candidate model on a copy of real production traffic without serving its outputs to users, so its quality and cost can be measured against the incumbent on identical inputs, at zero user risk.