Crypto-Billing

OpenAI can search. Perplexity is search. EasyRouterAI is open-weight models with Perplexity-style search turned on by default — one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, crypto billing, no subscription. If you’ve built anything with search-grounded LLMs, you already know the trade-offs. Perplexity makes search the product — but you’re inside their model lineup. OpenAI has web search via its Responses API — but you’re inside the OpenAI billing stack and the OpenAI model family. Want to swap in DeepSeek V4 for a reasoning-heavy task, or Qwen3.8-Max for long-context retrieval, and keep advanced search on? You’re stitching providers together yourself. ...

Most LLM providers share the same checkout page: email, credit card, billing address, sometimes a KYC review. For a team that already holds Bitcoin, that page is the bottleneck — not the model. This post walks through the workflow when the provider accepts Bitcoin directly: how a top-up becomes API calls, how search factors into the bill, and where the gotchas are. The usual checkout A typical LLM API signup looks like this: ...

Tavily is the default answer to “how do I give my agent web search?” It has a clean API, good retrieval quality, and a free tier. But it also has a separate account, a separate API key, and a separate dollar-denominated bill. The friction is not the dollar part. It is the second of everything: a second signup, a second key, a second dashboard, a second line on your statement. This post compares the realistic alternatives — what they replace, how they bill, and where each one fits. ...