FAQ
Questions buyers ask first
Finest routes each request to the cheapest model proven to do that job as well as the one you asked for. Swap your API key, keep your code, pay nothing unless it saves you money. Below are the questions that decide whether that is true, answered in full, including the ones whose honest answer is inconvenient for us.
- Does my traffic go through you?
- Yes, and we will not pretend otherwise. You pointed your client at our gateway, so your request passes through our process in memory. We do not keep it: no table in this codebase has a column for prompt or completion content. Set FINEST_DISABLE=1 in your own environment and every call goes straight to your provider again, with no redeploy of our code.
- What is the fastest thing I can do?
- Change a base URL and a key, or tell your coding agent to add Finest. Nothing else. No route annotation, no test corpus, no graders. Every call is served as the model you asked for until a recorded test covers that exact job on a cheaper model.
- How do you decide a cheaper model is safe for my task?
- We start from tests Finest ran itself, on open corpora, and publish each result against the exact prompt, schema, endpoint and settings measured. Failures are published too, and they authorise nothing. A test we ran earns the label “Recommended”, never “verified for you”. Only a test on your own examples earns that.
- What if the cheaper model is worse?
- Then it is not eligible. A cheaper model has to clear a quality bar set before the test ran, on a frozen set of examples we name. Live traffic then starts with a small slice that rolls back automatically if results get worse. If the cheaper model refuses a call or returns malformed output, we re-run that call on your model at our expense.
- Can accepting your recommendation make my bill go up?
- No, and not as a promise. We bill against the lower of what you were spending and the option we recommended, so a pricier recommendation cannot become the number we charge against. It joins that number only if you independently run it in production for a defined window.
- Is finest/auto a way to route me somewhere profitable for you?
- Structurally, no. finest/auto is flat-priced and never savings-share priced, so the model it picks cannot increase what we charge. It rules out anything that fails your stated requirements first: region, modality, context window, output cap, streaming, structured output. An endpoint that cannot prove it meets a requirement is excluded rather than waved through. Every response names the provider and model that actually served you.
- How do I leave?
- Eject is a product, not a support ticket. It provisions your own provider accounts, exports your evidence and receipts, converts the policies we serve into policies you hold, and verifies your app no longer depends on our uptime. We advertise this because a business built on token margin cannot copy it without dismantling itself.
- Do you need to see our prompts?
- No. We test on frozen public, synthetic or CI examples only, and this release refuses uploaded, staging and production content outright. Encrypted content storage is not built, so we will not accept content we cannot protect.
- Are you charging a savings fee today?
- Yes, on requests where we actually substituted a model and the substitution saved you money. The share is 25% of that request’s saving, debited from your prepaid balance as the request is served, and it is on the receipt beside both prices. Two things never carry a share: a request served on the model you named, and a cheap attempt that failed and had to be re-run. And nothing is charged against a baseline you have not confirmed in the console.
- Which models can you switch to?
- Only models already in our catalogue, each with current published prices and a human sign-off. A vendor’s launch blog post is not a sign-off and cannot authorise a swap. We also need signed commercial terms with the provider before we will serve it for you at all, and that is off by default for every provider.
The full product description is on what Finest is, the mechanism and a recorded head-to-head are on how it works, and the worked 25% example is on pricing. Anything still unanswered, ask us on the contact page.