Perspective API ends Dec 31 — I built a Perspective-compatible toxicity scorer at $0.005 a call

Google is shutting down the Perspective API on December 31, 2026. If your moderation pipeline, your community bot, or your research depends on it, you need a new home for toxicity scoring. I built one.

What it is

A Perspective-compatible toxicity scorer: send comment text, get back a toxicity score in the same shape Perspective users already know — so migration is mostly an endpoint change, not a rewrite.

• Endpoint: POST https://exchangerebel.com/toll/toxicity/analyze
• Price: $0.005 per call · batch of up to 100 comments for $0.25
• No subscription, no monthly minimum, no API-key dashboard to babysit. It is pay-per-call, built for scripts and AI agents as much as for humans.

How good is it — measured, not claimed

I evaluated it against Jigsaw's public test data (the same source Perspective was built on): 63,978 comments, mean AUC 0.9863 across the toxicity attributes. That is a strong score, and I am publishing it because a scorer you cannot measure is a scorer you cannot trust.

One honest limitation, stated up front: scores in the 0.3–0.7 band are review territory, not verdicts. No classifier — mine included — should auto-ban a human on a mid-band score. Design your pipeline so the middle goes to a person.

Why pay-per-call

Perspective was free, and free is why it is being shut down. A scorer that charges half a cent per call can afford to exist next year. If you are an agent developer: this is one of 34 pay-per-call data services at ExchangeRebel, all priced the same way — you only pay for delivered answers, and a failed call is refunded, not billed.

Try it with one comment you already know the answer to. That is the only demo that matters.