Pricing

Priced on what you save. Discounted for what you contribute.

You pay per 1M tokens swarmsDB kept out of your context window — the reduction between the upstream payload and the section you asked for. Your unit rate is set by your own 7-day rolling cache-hit rate.

Fetching cold data

You are paying the latency to populate a cache every later caller benefits from. You warm the network, so you pay the lowest rate.

Served from cache

You get answers in milliseconds off work someone else did. You pay the fair share for it.

Pioneer
$0.50
per 1M tokens saved
under 50% cache Cache warmers
Contributor
$0.75
per 1M tokens saved
50–75% cache Balanced usage
Beneficiary
$1.00
per 1M tokens saved
75–90% cache Mostly served warm
Cache Rider
$1.25
per 1M tokens saved
90%+ cache Network beneficiary

Warm the network and you pay less. Ride a warm cache and you get the lowest latency, and pay the fair share for it.

Budgets that actually stop

Over budget returns a real 402/429, not a silent truncation.

Academic access

Discounted or free for students and research groups. Ask.

Start building

Questions worth asking

What exactly is a "saved token"?

The reduction between what the upstream sent and the section you asked for. If a provider returns 40,000 tokens and you projected four fields that come to 400, you are billed on the 39,600 that never entered your context window.

Why does a higher cache-hit rate cost more per token?

Because caching is a shared resource and someone has to fill it. A caller fetching cold data pays the latency to populate a cache every later caller benefits from, so they get the lowest rate. A caller served almost entirely from cache gets millisecond answers off work someone else did, and pays the fair share for it. Warm the network and you pay less. Ride a warm cache and you get the lowest latency, and pay the fair share for it.

How is my tier decided?

By your own 7-day rolling cache-hit rate, so it moves with your actual usage rather than being negotiated. You can see the current figure and your tier in the console.

What happens when I hit my budget?

Over budget returns a real 402/429, not a silent truncation. Enforcement is on the serving path, so an autonomous swarm cannot quietly run past a cap and leave you to find out on the invoice.

Is there a free tier?

Yes — you can start without a card. Academic and research use is discounted or free; ask.

Point one agent at it.

Connect over MCP or REST. If your agents read more than one source, the context bill is the first thing you will see move.

Start building See how it works

Measured on our own agent-swarm workload. swarmsDB is battle-tested, not yet widely adopted — external traction is the next milestone.