Contextual AI reranker API

contextual.ai/pricingRerank API, one time free credit on signupinference/contextual-ai-rerankJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: New signups receive USD 25 in free credits, USD 50 with a work email; the rerank API launch post states the first USD 50 as 1 billion tokens.
Verdict: triala time-boxed or one-time trial, not a recurring allowance
Cost: free tier
Identity: emailno card, no phone
Binding limit: volume-quotaUSD 25 of free credit (USD 50 with a work email), one-time; at USD 0.05 per million tokens USD 25 covers 500 million rerank-v2 tokens (derived), and the launch post states USD 50 as 1 billion tokens
Evidence: documented6 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
Freshness: stale on 2026-12-04checked 2026-11-03 (live); stale on 2026-12-04

Free tier	new signups receive USD 25 in free credits, USD 50 with a work email; the rerank API launch post states the first USD 50 as 1 billion tokens. Rerank-v2 costs USD 0.05 per million tokens and Rerank-v2-mini USD 0.02 unit credits; metered on request-count; the credit is USD and is shared with the vendor's agent and parse products; whether the USD 25 credit applies to the standalone rerank endpoint is stated only by the launch post for the work-email case
Price	none stated
Limits	volume-quota (binding) USD 25 of free credit (USD 50 with a work email), one-time; at USD 0.05 per million tokens USD 25 covers 500 million rerank-v2 tokens (derived), and the launch post states USD 50 as 1 billion tokens source per-object-cap one request may carry at most 400,000 tokens in total, and the query, instruction and any single document with its metadata at most 8,000 tokens source request-rate unverified: no requests-per-minute figure for the standalone rerank endpoint was found on the pages read source
Binding	volume-quota the one-time USD credit is spent first; no request-rate figure is published for the rerank endpoint
Identity	email an account on the vendor's app; a work email earns USD 50 where another address earns USD 25; the billing page asks for a card only to add credits; unverified: the sign-up form fields, because the app page could not be read
Egress	not published
Interface	rest endpoint: https://api.contextual.ai/v1/rerank
Tooling	POST https://api.contextual.ai/v1/rerank with a bearer key; Python SDK; the reranker weights are also on Hugging Face
Composes with	a rerank-only offer: it takes the candidates that any embedding API or keyword search returned as the first stage
Reliability	no reliability event recorded; the free credit does not renew
Notes	derived: USD 25 / USD 0.05 per million tokens = 500 million tokens of rerank-v2
Evidence note	documented the credit amounts, prices and request caps are quoted from vendor pages; the standalone-rerank rate limit and the sign-up form are unverified.
Parsed numbers	has-free-tier 1 volume-quota 2 tokens per-object-cap 400000 tokens

Evidence 6

date	source	what it proved
2026-11-03	docs.contextual.ai/reference/faq.md	part of the text of Free tier, above
2026-11-03	contextual.ai/blog/rerank-v2	the rerank API launch post gives the first USD 50, stated as 1 billion tokens, free for a business email
2026-11-03	contextual.ai/pricing	the rerank-v2 price per million tokens
2026-11-03	contextual.ai/pricing	the rerank-v2-mini price per million tokens
2026-11-03	docs.contextual.ai/api-reference/rerank/rerank.md	per-request caps of 400,000 tokens in total and 8,000 tokens per query, instruction and document
2026-11-03	docs.contextual.ai/admin-setup/pricing-billing.md	a card is asked for when topping up credits

Unknown values 3

egress metered: egress metering was not published
per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer