Firstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success.

Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.

Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.

I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.

If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!

Hey Ben. I find communication like this fairly off-putting. In so far the 80% cheaper per token (or any part of it) is something of your own making/ingenuity, by all means, do tell, but it requires comparing token cost fairly with comparable models on i.e. OpenRouter and not across different models and pretending it's the same thing.

https://relax.ai/privacy-policy

"We may share personal information to third parties outside of the UK"

"to find out how long your information is being retained, please see 'additional information'". Additional information is an email address.

https://relax.ai/terms-of-service

non-committal will not share customer data "except[...]with the consent of the Customer". 'see DPA'. there is no DPA on this page.

otherwise,

my use on novita with zero data retention [in, out, cache]: [65.9, 2.4, 424.6][1.74, 3.48, 0.13] = $178.22

i couldn't see cache price on relax, so [65.9, 2.4, 424.6][1.17, 2.33, 1.17] = 579.48gbp = $774.45

I must be missing something, but is the API post-paid only? I couldn't see where to add pre-paid credit to the account, like OpenAI & Anthropic offer. I'm not really looking to be on another subscription and I would be accessing via third-party harnesses anyway. I'd also want to opt-out of training, which I understandably can't do on the free plan.

Marketing aside, why are you using the term "UK sovereign"?

I assume UK based DCs, so why not just say that, UK based LLM inference.

Is it a DC owned/ran by HM Gov? Is that why it's sovereign?

Not a criticism, more of a critique.

Is your business plan essentially to run mid tier models on hardware in the UK?

I do see the value in this as some enterprises need local data residency, the UK energy grid realistically can't handle new multi GW xAI-style data centres, and many applications don't need frontier models (but do need more than small local ones).

So the pricing is 12.50/month for unlimited chat, or 60p per million tokens output/10p per million input? For use with a coding assistant it would be the latter?

Hi Ben - how are you positioning yourself vs LocAI? I had a few chats with them and they have a fairly similar pitch.

good prices, but I don't see info on the token cache hits prices (in/out), are they available?.

Congrats on the launch. More options for consumers in this space the better!

why use this over openrouter?