The thesis
Most LLM aggregators charge a margin on every token you push through them. That made sense in 2023 when you were paying for routing, retries and a single bill — it stopped making sense the moment OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all shipped their own production-grade APIs with usage dashboards and granular keys.
What developers actually want now is the intelligence layer: pre-engineered prompts tested against the latest models, a registry of domain experts you can call by ID, observability that tells you which vertical is burning your budget, and an MCP server that drops 76 experts straight into Cursor or Claude Code. That is what we sell. The tokens are between you and your provider.
How we got here
Brandyze ships marketing-intelligence software. To do that we run dozens of LLM-backed pipelines — competitive scraping, copy generation, SEO audits, customer-intent classification — and we maintain an internal library of prompts, tools and routing rules per vertical. By late 2025 the library had grown to 76 production-tested experts with continuous benchmarks against new model releases.
VerticalAPI is that internal library, packaged as a public BYOK gateway. The same prompts that route Brandyze's production traffic are the ones you call when you hit https://api.verticalapi.com/v1/chat/completions with model: "code-review". We dogfood every release.
What we believe
- Tokens are a commodity, prompts are not. The provider should bill you for compute. We bill you for the prompt engineering, routing logic and tooling that makes the vertical work.
- Drop-in or it doesn't ship. The whole API is OpenAI-compatible because nobody migrates SDKs to try a gateway.
base_urlswap, done. - Verticals beat playgrounds. A "best practices for code review" prompt you copy-paste loses to a tested vertical that knows when to call
get_security_advisories. We benchmark and version each vertical. - Your key, your data. BYOK means we encrypt your key, scope it to your workspace, never log raw values, and never train on your traffic.
The team
Brandyze
VerticalAPI is a Brandyze product. Brandyze is a small, profitable software studio based in Aix-en-Provence, France, focused on marketing intelligence and developer infrastructure. Founded by Hugo, the team builds, ships and operates the products itself — no offshoring, no ad agency layer.
Mission
Make production-grade vertical AI cheap, transparent and boring. Cheap because we refuse the token tax. Transparent because every vertical has a public benchmark page and a changelog. Boring because the API is just OpenAI — the same SDK, the same retries, the same streaming — with a smarter model field.
Contact
For sales, partnerships, security disclosures or anything that needs a human: [email protected]. For bugs and feature requests, open an issue on GitHub. For product updates, follow @verticalapi. Press kit and brand assets available on request.