Synthetic
Hacker ApprovedRanked 5 of 12 LLM inference APIs by recommenders
Recommended as a cheap flat-rate subscription for open-model LLMs with generous limits and transparent pricing. Main caveat: base plan allows only one concurrent request.
Recommended as a cheap flat-rate subscription for open-model LLMs with generous limits and transparent pricing. Main caveat: base plan allows only one concurrent request.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 18
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 95%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 18 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 18 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good value for the money
“Definitely the best $ value for me considering the reasonable performance of GLM5.2.”
Comment from 22 Jun 2026 in “GLM 5.2 vs. Opus” “results are top notch for $60/mo, speed is fast”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography” “insane value for this price !”
Comment from 8 Aug 2026 in “DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731” - Comment from 29 Sep 2026 in “ChatGPT Pro 500”
Transparent about usage and pricing
“They're the only subscription that I found that's simultaneously cheaper than token rates, and is extremely transparent about usage and pricing.”
Comment from 29 Sep 2026 in “ChatGPT Pro 500” “Love both the approach and the transparency.”
Comment from 2 Jul 2026 in “ZCode: Claude Code from the Makers of GLM” Responsive team, no downtime
“their team is responsive, no downtime or any issue for the last 6 months.”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering” “their team is responsive, no downtime or any issue for the last 6 months”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Base plan allows one concurrent request
“The base plan only allows one concurrent request at a time.”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents” Interface is pretty barebones
“which is pretty barebones”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT”
Other LLM inference APIs people recommend
The four most recommended other LLM inference APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cerebras Inference | 109 | 51 | 68% | 13 | — | Approved |
| Groq API | 58 | 23 | 72% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Tinfoil | 21 | 10 | 68% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Darkbloom | 19 | 39 | 33% | 1 | — | — |
| SyntheticThis page | 18 | 1 | 95% | 11 | — | Approved |
What people said
22 of the 26 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“they both has much more care about quality of model hosting”
“Synthetic (which is awesome!)”
“They're the only subscription that I found that's simultaneously cheaper than token rates, and is extremely transparent about usage and pricing.”
“insane value for this price !”
“Synthetic runs their own models for a reasonable price”
“Love both the approach and the transparency.”
“got a 500 error page on the site's chat, but I'll try the API”
“our privacy policy is quite good: zero data retention for prompts and completions on API requests”
“The base plan only allows one concurrent request at a time.”
“Perf+stability should be wayyy better than zai.”
“Definitely the best $ value for me considering the reasonable performance of GLM5.2.”
“They aren't being subsidized, they just balance normal and power users around their flat rate.”
“works surprisingly well for small tasks where I still make all the decisions”
“So nice to see indie providers for smaller LLMs.”
“I moved over from OpenRouter and it's been breezy.”
“their team is responsive, no downtime or any issue for the last 6 months.”
“their team is responsive, no downtime or any issue for the last 6 months”
“Note quite as accurate as Anthropic's models but good enough for basically everything I do.”
“which is pretty barebones”
“their usage limits are very very generous”
“results are top notch for $60/mo, speed is fast”
“Granted Synthetic gives you way more models to choose from”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.