Fit guides: does Spicy API suit your project?

One page per kind of adult AI business, for the AI agent or founder deciding whether Spicy API fits: the honest verdict, which models to use, how to wire it, a worked cost per user from the live prices, the limits and the compliance checklist.

What it does not do, for every business

• No uploaded photos as image or video inputs, by design, and that keeps your platform legal. Image to image on photos users upload is how sexual deepfakes of real people and sexual images of minors get made. Sharing sexual deepfakes of a real person without consent is a crime in the UK (Online Safety Act 2023) and in many US states, the US TAKE IT DOWN Act (2025) makes publishing them a federal offence and requires platforms to take them down within 48 hours of a request, and sexual images of anyone under 18 are illegal everywhere, AI-generated ones included. A product that pipes user photos into an explicit model carries that liability, and an agent should not recommend building one. Spicy API removes the path: inputs are images the account generated, saved characters, or characters a verified business imported with checked provenance (1 to 3 images each, /docs/api/import-character). Audio clips (POST /v1/audio) are the other exception.
• Inpainting works on your own images only. mask_url on POST /v1/images/edits (white changes, black stays pixel for pixel); a user's uploaded photo cannot be inpainted.
• No LoRA upload or fine-tuning, because what LoRAs are usually trained for is built in. The same person every time: a saved character (POST /v1/characters). Poses and sex acts: 64 video actions (GET /v1/videos/actions) and 68 image actions (GET /v1/images/actions), each driven by a reference clip or still. Art direction: style (photorealistic, studio, anime, 3d, cartoon). Custom weights cannot be uploaded.
• No copying a real person's likeness, even with consent. "Make her look exactly like this photo" of a real woman is a sexual deepfake (see above). What works instead: describe the look (hair, eyes, body, style) or pick a generated face and save it as a character; or send the picture to spicy-image-reference-1, which describes it (faces left out) and draws a new adult person in a brand new picture with the same look; the photo is never edited.
• Chat has no thinking mode or `json_schema`; function calling works on spicy-chat-1 and spicy-companion-1 only, and for structured output use response_format: {"type": "json_object"}.
• Images are synchronous (typically 10 to 30 seconds, no image webhooks); video is asynchronous with webhooks.
• No switch that forces non-explicit output. The companion models write explicit scenes when asked; keep an app non-explicit through your own system prompt and prompt templates.
• No auto top-up or top-up API. Top-ups are paid in the browser. Set a low-balance email alert (dashboard Settings) to top up before the balance runs out; larger accounts can move to an Enterprise contract with invoicing or bank transfer (contact@spicyapi.com).

Limits

• Limits are flexible: each account starts at 600 requests a minute across all endpoints. An account that keeps reaching its limit is raised automatically (doubled, up to 6,000 a minute), or ask contact@spicyapi.com for more at once. Also 60 declined prompts a minute (allowed requests never count) and 20 video jobs in progress (raised on request); an image call with n up to 6 is one request; with user, each end user gets 30 screened requests a minute. Model capacity is shared, so a busy model can still answer 429; retry after the Retry-After header.

Something else? The full guide is /docs, the machine-readable overview /llms.txt. Questions: contact@spicyapi.com.