I built a marketplace for unused API capacity. Here’s why.
AI teams are spending more and more on API usage, while some teams have capacity they aren’t fully using.
At the same time, other AI builders are looking for ways to reduce their API costs without sacrificing the models they rely on.
That made me wonder: what if unused API capacity could be useful to another team instead?
So we built Unburn — a marketplace designed to connect teams with unused API capacity to AI builders looking for more affordable API usage.
Where it stands today: Unburn is live and in the early validation stage. We’re currently looking for AI teams with significant API usage who are willing to test the idea and share honest feedback.
What I still want to understand:
- Would you use something like this? What would make you trust it?
- If you have high API costs, what are you doing today to reduce them?
- Which AI providers do you spend the most on?
If you’ve dealt with high API costs, I’d genuinely love to hear how you handle them today.
The trust question seems like the key hurdle, especially around provider terms and reliability. A narrow pilot with a small set of well-understood workloads could help you learn whether the savings are meaningful before tackling every edge case. I’d also ask early users what proof they need to feel comfortable testing it—compliance clarity, predictable SLAs, or simply transparent usage accounting.
Have early AI teams shown willingness to actually route production usage through Unburn, or is the strongest signal so far interest in the cost savings?
The trust question is the right one to focus on first. API credits are often tied to enterprise rate limits and provider contracts, so the issue isn't really 'can I trade this?' but 'will using a third-party marketplace cause problems with my provider?' I'd be curious whether you're seeing more demand from the buyer side (cheaper API access) or seller side (teams with unused capacity to offload). That split usually tells you where the real pain is.
Interesting idea. My biggest questions would be around provider terms of service, reliability, and security. If API credits or capacity aren't officially transferable, many teams may worry about account risk or losing access unexpectedly.
Trust would probably come from clear compliance with provider policies, transparent pricing, usage guarantees, and a way to ensure sensitive data never passes through another team's infrastructure.
For reducing costs, most teams I know focus on model routing, prompt optimization, caching, batching, and using smaller models where possible before looking for alternative capacity sources. It would be interesting to see whether the savings from a marketplace like this are large enough to outweigh the operational and compliance concerns.