Last updated: 2026-08-19
CometAPI is a unified AI API gateway that advertises 99.9% uptime and sub-400ms average latency while routing calls to hundreds of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It differentiates from text-only routers by also covering image, video, and voice generation.
About CometAPI
CometAPI is a unified AI API gateway founded in 2025 by Sonic, a serial entrepreneur with 15+ years building technology products. It solves a concrete integration problem: instead of managing separate accounts, keys, and billing relationships with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and dozens of other model providers, developers point a single OpenAI-compatible client at https://api.cometapi.com/v1 and switch model names to access text, image, video, music, and voice models from one account. It is built for developers and small to mid-sized engineering teams who need to prototype or run production workloads across multiple model families without renegotiating contracts with each vendor. CometAPI advertises a 99.9% availability SLA and sub-400ms average latency across its gateway. Pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model with no monthly subscription: a free trial needs no credit card, standard usage bills per token or per generation below official provider rates, and a custom Enterprise tier adds volume discounts and a dedicated account manager. CometAPI runs on web only, since the product is consumed entirely as an API with no desktop or mobile client. The company maintains a public GitHub organization (CometAPI-dev) publishing SDK and proxy tooling, and it competes directly with OpenRouter, Together AI, LiteLLM, Portkey, and Replicate in the AI gateway space, differentiating mainly on its catalog of non-text models such as image, video, music, and voice, alongside standard LLM routing.
Pricing
Free trial credits require no credit card. After that, CometAPI runs pure pay-as-you-go metered billing, priced roughly 20% below each provider's official rate, for example Claude Sonnet 5 at $1.60 per million tokens versus the official $2.00, and FLUX 2 MAX images at $0.008 versus $0.01. Vidu Q3 Turbo video bills at $0.028 per second. There is no monthly subscription or minimum spend, and unused credits never expire. The Enterprise tier is custom-priced with volume discounts, a dedicated account manager, and custom SLAs.
Key Features
- 500+ model catalog: One API key and one OpenAI-compatible endpoint reach more than 500 models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other providers.
- Below-market per-model pricing: Prices popular models under the provider's own list price rather than passing through at parity, unlike some competing gateways.
- Multi-modal routing: Extends past text models into image (FLUX, GPT Image, Nano Banana), video (Vidu, Happy Horse), TTS, and STT endpoints behind the same key.
- Drop-in OpenAI SDK compatibility: Existing OpenAI SDK code points at https://api.cometapi.com/v1 with a model-name swap and no other code changes.
- Load balancing and fallback: Python SDK and proxy server support automatic fallback and load balancing across providers to reduce single-vendor outage risk.
- Non-expiring credit balance: Unused prepaid credits roll forward indefinitely with no expiration date, unlike many competitor gateways.
- Built-in benchmarking playground: Lets teams benchmark the same prompt against multiple models side by side before committing a production workload to one provider.
Pros
- Consistently undercuts official per-token and per-image rates across the models we checked, without sacrificing OpenAI-compatible drop-in access.
- Catalog spans text, image, video, and audio models versus text-only routing on many competing gateways.
- Non-expiring credit balance and no monthly subscription removes the use-it-or-lose-it pressure common on competitor plans.
Cons
- No publicly documented SOC 2, GDPR, or HIPAA attestations as of mid-2026, which rules it out for regulated enterprise workloads without further vendor due diligence.
- Founded in 2025, so it lacks the multi-year uptime track record and third-party review volume of OpenRouter or Together AI.
- Feature parity across providers is uneven; streaming behavior, tool-calling formats, and multimodal payload quirks can differ by underlying model.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does CometAPI actually cost?
CometAPI bills purely pay-as-you-go with no monthly subscription and includes a starter balance of trial credits at signup, no card required to claim it. Popular models are cheaper than going direct: Claude Sonnet 5 costs $1.60 per million tokens on CometAPI against $2.00 at the official price. An Enterprise tier adds custom volume pricing with a dedicated account manager.
Does CometAPI have a free plan?
No ongoing free tier exists below Enterprise. New accounts open with a starter trial balance instead, claimable without a card, and every call bills pay-as-you-go once that balance is gone. Nothing refreshes monthly after it runs out.
What should you use instead of CometAPI?
OpenRouter comes closest for teams that want exact provider-cost parity on text-only routing. Together AI answers a different need, with dedicated GPU capacity, batch processing, and fine-tuning rather than request routing. Replicate suits running one specific open-source checkpoint directly instead of routing across hosted proprietary APIs.
What separates CometAPI from OpenRouter?
CometAPI's catalog reaches beyond text into image, video, and audio models, while OpenRouter focuses primarily on text and reasoning-enabled LLMs. OpenRouter runs pass-through pricing close to each provider's list price plus a small platform fee, while CometAPI prices popular models below official rates. OpenRouter's routing automatically shifts requests to healthy providers during an outage; CometAPI instead emphasizes a serverless architecture built for high concurrency.
How do you set up CometAPI?
Open an account on cometapi.com without a card and starter trial credits land immediately. Copy the generated key from the dashboard, point an existing OpenAI SDK client at CometAPI's base URL, and swap in a CometAPI model name. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so most integrations need nothing beyond that base URL and model change.
Top Alternatives
- OpenRouter: OpenRouter is enough when a single-vendor LLM router with no non-text catalog covers the job; CometAPI adds image, video, and voice models to the same account.
- Together AI: Together AI is built for dedicated GPU capacity, custom fine-tuning, and large batch inference, while CometAPI stays a lightweight multi-model API with unified billing.
- Replicate: Replicate runs one specific open-source checkpoint under your own control, whereas CometAPI puts many hosted providers on one OpenAI-compatible bill.
HokAI guides covering CometAPI
- CometAPI vs Orthogonal: Same Gateway Label, Two Different Jobs: CometAPI and Orthogonal both call themselves a unified AI gateway, but one routes 500+ models and the other gives agents pay-per-call access to 40+ tools.
- Stripe Didn't Just Buy OpenRouter. It Already Owned the Money Underneath It.: Stripe's reported $7B OpenRouter buy isn't new; Stripe became its billing backbone in January 2026. What that means for neutral AI routing, and what to watch.