Air Cloud Pricing Breakdown: From Air API to Air Container
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Real AI utilization starts with infrastructure — the kind that lets anyone use AI as much as they need, whenever they need it.
As AI adoption accelerates, so does the infrastructure market behind it. Providers worldwide are competing across different architectures, and AIEEV is part of that race. Our approach is different: instead of building on centralized data centers, we launched as a distributed cloud that connects idle GPU resources across a decentralized network.
Today, we're breaking down exactly how much that architectural difference saves you in practice — with direct price comparisons against major providers.
Part 1: Air API Pricing
The AI agent space has changed fast. OpenClaw emerged as an agent capable of executing real computer tasks from a single command. Since then, Hermes and other agents have entered the market, while Claude Code and Codex have rapidly expanded their capabilities. Use cases like "run automations while you sleep," "build your own AI employee," and "deploy an AI trading bot" are no longer experiments — they're being shipped.
But having an idea and a model isn't enough. The real barrier is cost. AI agents work by calling model APIs from providers like OpenAI or Anthropic — either directly or through aggregator platforms like OpenRouter. The more repetitive tasks an agent runs, the more API costs accumulate. At scale, API pricing becomes one of the largest operational variables. Air API is built for exactly this environment — designed to stay cost-efficient even under high-volume, repetitive API workloads. As you'll see below, Air API offers lower rates for Qwen3.5 models than accessing the same models through OpenRouter.
If you're already using Qwen3.5 with OpenClaw, switching to Air API takes a single command:
openclaw plugins install clawhub:@aieev/openclaw-airapi-providerAs covered in a previous post, this connects OpenClaw directly to Air API — giving you the lowest available rate for the same model.
Qwen3.5-9B
Qwen3.5-9B is the go-to model for services that prioritize low latency and minimal per-call cost — real-time agents, high-throughput pipelines, and cost-sensitive automation. We compared Air API pricing directly against other providers offering the same model through OpenClaw.
Provider | Input (per 1M tokens) | Output (per 1M tokens) |
Air API | $0.05 | $0.15 |
Together | $0.10 | $0.15 |
Venice | $0.10 | $0.15 |
*Source: Openrouter
Air API's input price for Qwen3.5-9B is half that of competing providers. Output pricing is on par across the board, which means the gap hits hardest on input-heavy workloads — particularly agentic applications and RAG pipelines where long context drives most token usage.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B handles complex reasoning tasks and sits in the most price-competitive tier of the Qwen3.5 lineup. Here's how providers compare:
Provider | Input (per 1M tokens) | Output (per 1M tokens) |
Air API | $0.1623 | $1.30 |
Alibaba Cloud Int. | $0.25(Original) $0.1625 | $2.00(Original) $1.30 |
Parasail | $0.20 | $1.00 |
AtlasCloud | $0.225 | $1.80 |
AkashML | $0.23 | $1.80 |
*Source: Openrouter
Every competing provider starts at $0.20 or above on input. Air API comes in at $0.16 — the lowest in the field. Compared to AkashML, which shows the widest input-to-output spread, Air API is approximately 29% cheaper on input and 28% cheaper on output.
Part 2: Air Container Pricing
Air API is an AIaaS product — you call the model, we handle the infrastructure. But as traffic grows or when teams need to run their own models, direct infrastructure access becomes the better fit. That's where CaaS (Container as a Service) comes in.
Air Container is our GPU instance rental service built on a container-native architecture. For this comparison, we looked at four providers with a comparable CaaS model: RunPod, io.net, CoreWeave, and Verda. We selected the two GPU models with the highest demand on Air Cloud today: the RTX 5090 and the RTX 6000 Pro.
RTX 5090
The NVIDIA RTX 5090 is the top-tier consumer GPU — high compute performance at a relatively accessible price point. It's widely used for AI inference workloads and fine-tuning experiments.
Air Container's RTX 5090 instance is priced at $0.75/hr. CoreWeave and Verda do not currently offer RTX 5090 instances. Among providers that do, AIEEV is the lowest — 19% cheaper than io.net and 32% cheaper than RunPod.
RTX 6000 Pro
The RTX 6000 Pro is NVIDIA's professional-grade workstation GPU. With large VRAM capacity and stability for extended runtimes, it's built for production AI inference and enterprise-scale workloads.
Air Container's RTX 6000 Pro instance is priced at $1.57/hr. The most striking comparison is with CoreWeave: Air Container comes in at 59% cheaper. (See full GPU pricing at here.)
Summary
Pricing alone doesn't close an infrastructure decision. Traffic volume and patterns, autoscaling support, long-term reservation discounts, and container-native compatibility all matter. We've pulled the factors that infrastructure buyers consistently evaluate into one view:
항목 | AIEEV | RunPod | io.net | CoreWeave | Verda |
RTX 5090 ($/hr) | $0.75 | $0.99 | $0.89 | 미지원 | 미지원 |
RTX 6000 Pro ($/hr) | $1.57 | $1.69 | $1.79 | $2.50 | $1.69 |
Spot / Reservation discount | O | O | X | △ (Limited) | △ (Limited) |
오토스케일링 | O | X | O | O | X |
K8s / Container-native | O | O | O | O | O |
AIEEV's advantage extends beyond raw GPU prices — it holds across discount structure and autoscaling support. The short version:
Up to 59% cheaper than comparable providers on RTX 5090 and RTX 6000 Pro
Up to 25% discount on reservations of 6 months or more
Container-native with autoscaling support
Among the lowest Air API call rates in the industry
ISO 27001 certified
The price gap comes directly from how we're built. We're often asked what makes a distributed cloud better than the traditional model — and cost is the clearest answer. A fully distributed cloud built on idle GPU resources carries none of the fixed overhead that comes with operating physical data centers at scale. Building from a different architecture produces different economics, and those economics show up in the prices you've seen here.
See it for yourself on Air Cloud.
*References
