Services · inference-gateway

PPQ.AI (PayPerQ)

Pay-per-query access to hundreds of frontier models over Lightning / L402 — no account, no API key, roughly a cent and a half a query — now including end-to-end-encrypted private models.

What it is

PPQ.AI (PayPerQ) is a gateway to hundreds of frontier chat, image, video, and audio models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Meta, and more) that you can pay for per request over Lightning / L402 with no account or API key required. Average query cost is around 1.5¢, with top-ups from about 10¢. It is another live instance of “an agent pays for its own inference” — the simplest on-ramp for an agent to buy frontier-model calls without provisioning provider accounts.

It also runs a private-inference tier: a set of models served inside TEEs (trusted execution environments, on NVIDIA confidential-computing GPUs) with end-to-end encryption — prompts are encrypted in your browser and decrypted only inside the hardware-attested enclave, so “PayPerQ never sees your prompts or responses.” Private models are addressed with a private/ prefix and currently include private/glm-5-2 (384K context), Kimi K2.6, GPT-OSS 120B, Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen3-VL 30B, and Gemma 4 31B. It also publishes a /llms.txt and an API surface designed to be consumed directly by agents.

When to use it

• Quick, accountless access to many models behind one pay-per-call endpoint.
• Agents that need to buy inference on demand without managing per-provider API keys.
• Privacy-sensitive workloads — the private/ TEE tier keeps prompts unreadable to the gateway.
• Lightning-native metering of model usage.

Dependencies & payment

Dependencies: a Lightning / L402 wallet or L402-capable client — no account and no API key on the Lightning path — or a funded top-up balance; the private/ models add TEE-attested end-to-end encryption (Tinfoil-style encrypted-body protocol), with a local encryption proxy available open-source. Payment: Lightning / L402, pay-per-query (~1.5¢ a query; top-ups from ~10¢); credit-card funding is available but adds KYC.

Quick start

Use the no-account L402 flow or top up a balance, then call the API documented at ppq.ai/api-docs (machine pointer at ppq.ai/llms.txt). For private inference, prefix the model id with private/ (e.g. private/glm-5-2); the open-source ppq-private-mode-proxy repo provides a local encryption proxy. The core service itself is not open-source.

Gotchas

• It is a centralized custodial gateway to third-party providers — PPQ proxies your prompts upstream. Only the private/ TEE tier (hardware-attested enclave + browser-side encryption) keeps content unreadable to PPQ; the standard models do not.
• The no-account path stores balance and usage locally — losing local state or the payment credential can lose access.
• Funding by credit card introduces KYC; the Lightning/no-account path is the privacy-preserving one.