Venice AI alternative: the same uncensored models by API, priced per token

Pick Venice when you want a private chat app with a flat price: Pro was $18 a month on 2026-10-19, with unlimited text prompts in the app, 1,000 images a day and a daily credit scheme its API calls draw on first. Pick this Venice AI alternative when you pay per token from your own code or a roleplay frontend, want uncensored, abliterated and roleplay builds next to Claude, GPT and Gemini on one key, and want a receipt and a daily real-model check on each of them.

The one number: 100 roleplay messages of 4,000 tokens in and 300 out cost $0.107 on Venice Uncensored 1.2 at Venice's API price on 2026-10-19, and $0.0751 on GLM-5.3 Uncensored here at today's rate, or $0.0361 on GLM-5.3 Flash Uncensored, the lowest-priced build on the key. Every Venice figure on this page carries the date it was read and links to the page it came from.

Venice sells a chat app first and an API second. Its pricing page lists four plans, and credits are the unit across all of them: 100 credits equal one dollar, and credits pay for video, premium image models, upscaling and API calls.

Its API pricing page says API requests are pay-per-use at the rates on the page, with no unmetered tier. Pro bundles one dollar of API spend a month, Pro Plus $75 and Max $225, and each paid request is deducted in a fixed order: Diem, then earned credits, then bundled credits, then USD. A Diem is one dollar a day of credits that refresh daily. The DIEM page itself answered 404 on 2026-10-19, so the daily figure here is the one its pricing docs print.

The uncensored text models on that page, in USD per million tokens:

The same page lists GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Kimi and Grok models by API, which this page did not read row by row, so it makes no price claim on them. On media, its image list runs from $0.01 an image, its edit list has qwen-edit-uncensored at $0.04 an edit, and every video model is priced per job through its quote API.

Two more pages set Venice's stance. Its privacy page says it does not store or log prompt and response content for normal inference, and that its API replicates the same backend architecture as the app. Its no-KYC post of 2026-09-03 says sign-up needs no government ID and no phone number, takes card, BTC or USDC, and calls the service no-KYC and no-log on the default model. Both were read on 2026-10-19.

49 uncensored, abliterated and roleplay builds run on one OpenAI-compatible key, priced from the live catalog below and listed on the uncensored LLM API hub. Abliterated builds have the refusal direction removed from the weights; uncensored builds were changed to answer instead of refuse; Roleplay Uncensored is an independent model for character chat. The same key runs 75 more chat models.

Once a UTC day, every model on the key gets the same fixed test prompt. The input token count works as a tokenizer fingerprint, so a swapped model or added hidden instructions shows up as a changed count. At the last check (Oct 20 UTC), 30 of the 49 builds it has reached were stable. The results are public on the real-model check, and the method page shows the prompt.

The standard models sit on the same key and balance, with the developer's list price printed beside ours:

A roleplay user's month: 1,000 chat turns, each 4,000 tokens in (the character card, persona and recent chat) and 300 out, the message the best AI for roleplay post and the Janitor AI guide cost too. Venice's rows use its API prices from 2026-10-19; ours are live.

3 of the 49 builds cost less than Venice Uncensored 1.2's $0.107 for 100 messages: GLM-5.3 Flash Uncensored at $0.0361, GLM-4.7 Flash Uncensored at $0.066 and GLM-5.3 Uncensored at $0.0751. Roleplay Uncensored, the build with no thinking step, is $0.138 per 100 against $0.26 on Venice Role Play Uncensored.

Two things the table leaves out. On Venice, a Pro subscriber who chats in the app pays $18 flat for unlimited text prompts, so a month of app chat on a Pro model is $18 whatever the turn count; the per-token rows apply to the API. On our side, a thinking build spends part of its output budget thinking, and those tokens bill as output, so the real cost of a thinking build runs above the 300-token figure; Roleplay Uncensored has no thinking step.

Only rows read on Venice's own pages carry a Venice value; the rest say so. Every UplinkSwitch row is documented on the page in the source column.

• A chat app. Venice is a product you open and type into, with characters, image tools, encrypted chat backup on Pro and a flat monthly price. UplinkSwitch is an API and a console; the chat window is whichever frontend you connect.
• A free plan: 10 text prompts and 15 image prompts a day at $0 on 2026-10-19. There is no free credit here.
• Daily credit. A Diem is one dollar a day of credit that refreshes, and Pro Plus and Max bank unused bundled credit for two and three months. Our credit does not refresh; it is a balance.
• More media models. Its image list runs from $0.01 an image and its no-KYC post counts 230 or more models across the service, against our 82 media and 124 chat models. Its edit list prices qwen-edit-uncensored at $0.04 an edit.
• A lower API price on some uncensored builds. On 2026-10-19, Gemma 4 Uncensored was $0.1625 in and $0.50 out per million tokens on Venice; the tables above show which of ours sit under and over it.
• Private-mode and E2EE inference options described on its privacy page, including a mode that relays ciphertext to a verified TEE.

• Per token, no subscription. Credit is prepaid from $10 by card or crypto through our payment processor, and each top-up locks your rates for 30 days, so a month's budget holds when the catalog moves. There is no plan to pick and no credit that expires at the end of the day.
• 49 uncensored, abliterated and roleplay builds at one listed price each, among them GLM-5.3 Uncensored, Roleplay Uncensored, Gemma 31B Heretic Uncensored, QwQ 32B Uncensored and DeepSeek V4 Pro Uncensored. How abliteration works covers what the change does to the weights, and the uncensored Gemma post has a dated refusal test on the Heretic build.
• Claude, GPT, Gemini and the open models on the same key, with the developer's list price printed next to ours on every model page, so the discount is checkable rather than claimed.
• A daily real-model check on every chat model at /proof, with the verdict for each build in the table above.
• A signed receipt on every non-streamed answer and a signed monthly statement, checked in the browser at /statements/verify. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed to check one.
• A privacy page that lists what is kept, field by field: /privacy. What it keeps is a usage record per request and SHA-256 fingerprints, never the text, and the no-logs LLM API post puts that beside other providers.

Venice's base URL is https://api.venice.ai/api/v1 (its chat completions reference, read 2026-10-19); ours is https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1. Both take OpenAI-format chat completions, so if you came looking for a Venice AI API alternative, the switch is the base URL, the key and the model id. Drop the venice_parameters object; there is no equivalent here, and whatever rides along with a prompt shows in the daily check's token count.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1",  # was https://api.venice.ai/api/v1
    api_key="sk-uplink-live-...",
)

completion = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="glm-5.3-uncensored",  # was venice-uncensored-1-2
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Stay in character and greet the party."}],
)
print(completion.choices[0].message.content)

The SDK sends the key in an Authorization: Bearer header; x-api-key works too, and a key in the URL is refused. Streams pass through unchanged. One request lists every id the key can call:

curl https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer $UPLINKSWITCH_API_KEY"

The ids that replace Venice's uncensored ids, each checked in the live catalog when this page was built:

SillyTavern takes the base URL ending in /v1 as a Custom (OpenAI-compatible) source, and Janitor AI takes the full https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/chat/completions as a proxy URL. The SillyTavern guide has every field, and the OpenRouter uncensored models post prices Venice's Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition as OpenRouter listed it on the same day.

Is there anything better than Venice AI?

It depends on what you are doing. For private chat in a browser or an app with a flat monthly price, Venice's Pro plan ($18 a month, unlimited text prompts in the app, read 2026-10-19) is the thing to beat and this page does not try. For a developer or a roleplay frontend that pays per token, the question is price per message, which model, and what the provider stores: on 2026-10-20, 3 of our 49 uncensored builds cost less than Venice Uncensored 1.2 for 100 roleplay messages, and the same key runs Claude, GPT and Gemini. For a product sold to other people, read Venice's terms first: section 7.1 licenses personal, non-commercial use and 12(h) bars selling the access on (read 2026-10-19).

Which AI has the best free API?

None of the ones on this page. Venice's Free plan covers 10 text prompts and 15 image prompts a day in its app, and its docs say API calls are pay-per-use with no unmetered tier (read 2026-10-19). UplinkSwitch has no free API: credit is prepaid from $10, with no subscription, and $10 buys 27,685 roleplay messages of 4,000 tokens in and 300 out on GLM-5.3 Flash Uncensored at today's rate.

Is Venice AI censored now?

Its own pages on 2026-10-19 say two things at once. Its API pricing page lists 5 uncensored text models by id, among them venice-uncensored-1-2 and gemma-4-uncensored, and its pricing page labels the Free plan private and uncensored. Its terms (last updated 2026-06-08) say you may not disable its mature content filter, and that it may screen, remove or block content that violates them. Its chat API also adds a Venice system prompt unless include_venice_system_prompt is set to false. So: uncensored models, under a filter and a system prompt it controls. Here, the uncensored builds are listed by what was changed in the weights, and the daily check's token count shows whether anything rides along with your prompt.

Is there a way to get Venice AI for free?

Yes, in its app: the Free plan on 2026-10-19 was $0 with base models, 10 text prompts and 15 image prompts a day, and no monthly credits. API use on that plan is paid with credits. Pro, Pro Plus and Max subscribers get a one-time $5 of USD credit, which its docs say accounts that upgraded by staking VVV do not receive.

Is Venice AI 100% private?

Not by its own description, and neither is any hosted API. Venice's privacy page (read 2026-10-19) says it does not store or log prompt and response content for normal inference, that it may process metadata for authentication, billing, abuse prevention, reliability, analytics and support, and that in Anonymous mode the prompt is still visible to the model provider; its E2EE mode relays ciphertext to a verified TEE. The model that answers always sees the prompt.

Which AI is 100% private?

Only a model running on your own hardware. Any API provider sees your prompt, and so does the model host behind it. What you can compare is what each keeps. UplinkSwitch keeps one usage record per request (model, token counts, charge) and SHA-256 fingerprints of the request and response, never the text; bodies are not stored unless you turn on replay for a key, which keeps them 7 days. Model hosting providers under contract receive the request and response for the call. The /privacy page lists all of it, and the no-logs LLM API post compares providers on the same question.

Venice is a trademark of its owner; this page quotes its public pages as read on 2026-10-19 and links each one. Tell us if a figure has changed and it will be re-read.

Get a key: prepaid from $10, no subscription, 30-day price lock.