The best llm apis, according to hackers
10 llm apis recommended in Hacker News comments over the past year, ranked by how many separate people recommend each one.
- Most recommendedMistral314 people recommend it
- Built to lastOpenAI APIowners report a median of 0.75 years
- Least regretOpenAI Responses API17 recommend, 3 criticize
All llm apis
- MistralRecommended as a European, open-weight AI provider with EU data residency, on-prem deployment and fast responses, though critics say its models trail US and Chinese frontier models.314recommend
- DeepSeek APIRecommended for very low per-token prices, unusually cheap and effective caching, and no usage caps, but your data goes to China and is used for training.171recommend
- OpenAI APIRecommended for strong math and agentic coding work, simple prepaid billing and cost-saving caching, though critics worry about data privacy and spending limits that don't hold.166recommend
- Anthropic APIRecommended for straightforward pay-per-use access to Claude models with clear, stable pricing and no client lock-in. Common caveat: high token costs and uptime or account-suspension worries.58recommend
- System One Models by TypeSafePeople recommend it as a fast, low-cost alternative to large LLMs for classification and decision making. Critics most often say its benchmark claims and comparisons to LLMs are misleading.37recommend
- Claude APIDevelopers build apps and automate work on pay-as-you-go billing with prompt caching and clear key setup; critics cite frequent outages and unannounced changes.30recommend
- OpenAI Responses APIDevelopers recommend it for agents that keep reasoning server side and beat Chat Completions; the main caveat is lock-in to OpenAI.17recommend
- Moonshot AI APICheap API access to near-frontier models, with many open-weight releases. Critics warn the terms are permissive and that API use may be used for training.14recommend
- Grok 4.1 FastCheap xAI language model API that people find capable for research and everyday tasks. Caveat: requests were silently rerouted to Grok 4.3 at higher prices.14recommend
- OpenAI PlatformRecommended for building AI features, especially tool calling and multimodal work, and for its logging UI. Critics report bugs and no per-key spending limit.5recommend