# Tinfoil pricing and architecture

Tinfoil serves models inside **TEE-protected enclaves**. The co-op does not
self-host it — Tinfoil is a hosted cloud service; models run in Tinfoil's TEEs.
Tinfoil is the co-op's **architecturally-private** tier (contrast: GreenPT and
Regolo are the renewable tier, with policy-based privacy, not TEE).

## The architecture — read this before touching the Tinfoil route

LiteLLM does **not** talk to Tinfoil's enclave directly. Every Tinfoil model in the
gateway config points at:

```
api_base: http://127.0.0.1:3301/v1
```

That is a **local proxy** running **inside the gateway container**
(`/app/data/tinfoil-proxy -b 127.0.0.1 -p 3301`). LiteLLM speaks **plaintext
OpenAI** to the proxy; the proxy **verifies the enclave attestation and wraps the
request/response bodies in EHBP (HPKE)** before forwarding to the Tinfoil
enclave. The provider key is set via the environment variable `TINFOIL_API_KEY`.

Consequences:

- **The proxy is load-bearing.** If it is not running, every Tinfoil model fails;
  LiteLLM's own config still looks correct. Check the process, not just the config.
- **`http://127.0.0.1:3301` is intentional, not a misconfiguration.** Do not
  "fix" it to a public Tinfoil URL — the encryption happens in the proxy.
- The proxy binary lives on the persistent volume (`/app/data/tinfoil-proxy`), so
  it survives restarts; it is started by the app's `start.sh`.

## What we serve, and what it costs

Rates as recorded in the gateway config, **USD per 1M tokens** unless noted:

| our model | input | output | cached input |
|---|---|---|---|
| `tinfoil/deepseek-v4-1-flash` | $0.65 | $1.45 | $0.13 |
| `tinfoil/gpt-oss-120b` | $0.15 | $0.60 | — |
| `tinfoil/glm-5.3` | $1.80 | $5.75 | $0.45 |
| `tinfoil/whisper-large-v3-turbo` (STT) | $0 / 1M | — | **$0.01 per request** |
| `tinfoil/voxtral-tts` (TTS) | $0 / 1M | — | **$0.002 per request** |
| `tinfoil/nomic-embed-text` (embeddings) | $0.05 | $0 | — |

- **`tinfoil/glm-5.3` replaced `tinfoil/glm-5-3-flash`** (Tinfoil deprecated the
  flash variant on 2026-10-09). Text-only (no vision), reasoning + tool calling.
- **`tinfoil/deepseek-v4-1-flash` and the glm-flash variant carry an
  "Experimental: may be deprecated with minimal notice" flag from Tinfoil** —
  which is part of why the GreenPT counterpart is the default.

### Audio is billed per REQUEST, and needs a build-time patch

Tinfoil bills the audio models **per request** (its model list carries a
`requestPrice`), not per token. Reading only the two token prices made TTS look
free and left STT billed off an older catalog. **LiteLLM cannot price per request
on the audio paths**, so `patch_audio_request_cost.py` (built into the image via
the Dockerfile) makes the cost calculator honour `input_cost_per_request`.
**Re-check that build-log line after every LiteLLM upgrade.**

One non-obvious load-bearing detail: for TTS, `input_cost_per_character: 0` is
**required**. Without it the TTS cost branch raises `ValueError("cost for tts call
is None")` and aborts the whole calculation, so the spend write is skipped and
speech bills nothing — whatever `input_cost_per_request` says.

**Audio keep-alive** (the Cloudron scheduler task `audio_keepalive`, every 10 min)
pings the Tinfoil audio models so voice mode does not pay the ~24s TEE cold-start
after idle. It is **TTS-only by design**: the STT warm ping was disabled
2026-10-11 because it costs $0.01/request — roughly $52/month at 6 pings/hour.
`docs.inference.coop`-style "keep-alive economics" detail is in the script.

### The embedding model is operator-only

`tinfoil/nomic-embed-text` (768-dim) is **not** a member-facing model — it is
scoped to the co-op's own admin team (`model_info.team_id`) for the docs-RAG, so
member keys cannot call it. The portal also filters it out of the chat-facing
model list by its `mode: embedding`.

## Fallbacks

The router treats `tinfoil/deepseek-v4-1-flash` as the fallback for
`greenpt/deepseek-v4.1-flash`, and `tinfoil/gpt-oss-120b` as the fallback for
`tinfoil/deepseek-v4-1-flash`. The timeout is deliberately generous (180s) with
`TimeoutErrorRetries: 0` — DeepSeek generations routinely exceed 30s, and a
timed-out generation is **already billed** by Tinfoil, so re-hitting it re-bills.