On the other hand, it's much cheaper than Mathematica!
Their home edition is $300, but unlimited requests. Their API version is the equivalent of 5000 total requests over 5 months, or 4000 requests in 1 month ($240 for 3000 overage requests)
The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#22When academics launch a company, what do you expect?
Wolfram is industry, not Academia. They're used to billing sectors like aeronautics and oil for gazzilions. To them "web startups" are nobodies, and the price is there to keep the vagrants at bay.
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#23When academics launch a company, what do you expect?
Hello: http://timetric.com/
(and our API's got way friendlier terms.)
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#24$60 for 1000 requests just for protyping and personal use? Do they actually want anybody to use their product?
Especially with a hard to control textual query interface I suppose that a huge number of requests will be burned through for finding the correct wording to make Wolfram Alpha understand what you are trying to query.
They should really make a free dev account which either operates on a limited set of data, or deliberately delivers wrong numbers in their results.
A dev just needs a way to test his app without having to be careful about everyone of his tries costing real money.
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#25The prices seem insanely high, and the most expensive plan also has a bizarre structure ( http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing.html ). After you pass your initial 10 million request quota, the per request price is higher than during the quota! This means if you're doing 50 million requests, it's cheaper to buy 5 API keys w/10 million requests than to have one API key doing all 50 million. I would've expected…
All their plans have that structure. I'm guessing that they want to be able to plan what resources to give to Alpha on the basis of what their customers have signed up for, so they want to discourage "overuse". Also, you pay up front for the quota and presumably pay in arrears for any extras, so obviously they want to encourage you to pay earlier.
(Still seems pretty daft to me, though.)
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#26I was looking forward to using the API in my Firefox add-on that shows the Wolfram Alpha results next to the Google results. Quick calculation of the cost: 18,000 users/day * say 3 searches/day = ~$2,300/day.
I think I'll stick with loading it in an iframe. I would have thought that this kind of thing fit perfectly with the example use case "augmenting web and meta-web search with computed knowledge" but I guess they have a different target market.
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#27I guess I'll stick to Yahoo! Pipes.
Re: The Wolfram Alpha API Has Arrived
#28What has been created here is a new kind of API, one the result of a lifetime of experience, and one that will no doubt influence the way you think about programming for years to come.
How fortunate you all must feel to use this API, and to interact with this amazing, lifechanging software. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that within this API lies the ability to understand our very universe.