Editorial Standards
Methodology
How we arrive at a reputation, what our figures do and do not mean, and precisely how far each one should be trusted. Read this before quoting anything on this site.
Datum Index publishes a single headline number for each provider — a composite reputation from 0 to 100 — and a great deal of our editorial energy goes into making sure that number is never mistaken for something it is not. It is a judgement, formed editorially from the public record. It is not a measurement we took, not a metric the provider reports, and not a figure to be quoted as fact. This page exists so that nothing on the site reads as fabricated certainty.
The Composite
What the reputation score is
The reputation score is an editorial composite index, not a first-party metric. reputation.score is an editorial composite index (0-100), not a first-party metric. See each site's Methodology page for the weighting model. We weigh, in descending order of influence, four families of signal:
The weighting model
- Reliability & track record — published uptime, incident history, years in operation, and the accumulated verdict of practitioners. This carries the most weight.
- Trust & compliance — named attestations (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR posture) and enterprise diligence.
- Transparency & economics — honest, legible pricing and the absence of billing surprises, read alongside indicative cost.
- Capability & performance — model quality or breadth, throughput and latency, weighted least because it is the easiest to buy and the fastest to change.
We deliberately do not publish a spurious decimal formula. A composite reputation is a considered editorial reading, and dressing it in false arithmetic would imply a precision we do not claim. The direction of travel (▲ improving, ▼ slipping, — steady) reflects the trend in reviewer sentiment, not a change in the score.
Caveats
On pricing and latency
Two columns on this site are especially easy to misread, so we state their limits plainly.
Pricing. Blended prices are approximate USD per 1M tokens for a representative open model where the provider hosts one; proprietary-only providers list a flagship model instead. Latency figures are order-of-magnitude reference points, not SLAs. Prices are indicative reference points for comparison, not quotes; they move often, and a provider's real bill depends on model, region, context length, caching and commitment. Never cite a price here as a provider's current rate — follow the link to the provider and confirm.
Latency & throughput. Time-to-first-token and tokens-per-second are order-of-magnitude reference points, not SLAs. They vary by model, hardware tier, load and geography, and a single figure cannot capture that distribution. Datum Index does not run first-party probes; we read the public record.
The Confidence Legend
How far to trust each figure
Every provider — and many individual figures — carries one of three confidence marks. This is the legend, reproduced verbatim from our data schema.
Figure confirmed against the provider's public pricing/docs page on the last_reviewed date.
Figure based on public sources but not re-confirmed on the exact review date; may drift.
Illustrative seed value pending first-party verification. NOT to be quoted as fact.
Full Disclosure
Our confidence, provider by provider
So that nothing on the site reads as unqualified fact, here is the confidence we place in every dossier and its pricing figure.
| Provider | Category | Dossier confidence | Pricing confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Frontier Lab | high | medium |
| Anthropic | Frontier Lab | high | medium |
| OpenRouter | Router | high | medium |
| Groq | Specialist Hardware | high | medium |
| Together AI | Aggregator | high | medium |
| Fireworks AI | Aggregator | high | medium |
| Modal | GPU Cloud | medium | seed |
| Google Vertex AI | Hyperscaler | medium | seed |
| Baseten | GPU Cloud | medium | seed |
| Mistral La Plateforme | Frontier Lab | medium | seed |
| cheapestinference | Subscription (flat-rate) | seed | seed |
| Cerebras Inference | Specialist Hardware | medium | seed |
| Perplexity API | Specialist Application | medium | seed |
| DeepInfra | Aggregator | high | medium |
| Replicate | Aggregator | medium | seed |
| SambaNova Cloud | Specialist Hardware | medium | seed |
| Nebius AI Studio | GPU Cloud | medium | seed |
| Lepton AI | GPU Cloud | medium | seed |
| Novita AI | Aggregator | medium | seed |
| Hyperbolic | GPU Cloud | medium | seed |
Where a figure is marked seed, it is illustrative and pending first-party verification — honestly, an estimate that conveys the shape of an offering rather than a confirmed fact. We upgrade these marks in public as verification allows.