VerusCite reviews now cost $1

October 05, 2026

VerusCite reviews now cost $1

It was my original goal to make VerusCite reviews only $1. You can view the benchmark reporton VerusCite's methodology, but there are two main cost components — AI token usage and web search costs. When I first launched VerusCite, it was close to 50/50 total costs were in each bucket. So it ended up costing me around $0.20 to $0.30 for token costs, and the same for web search costs on average for a paper. So after purchasing fees, I would be close to zero margin for a paper review.

There have been two different product updates that have made it so I can reduce the price of a review to $1. One is the GPT-6 Luna model. Previously Gemini Flash models were both the cheapest and most accurate models for my VerusCite pipeline. The update to GPT-6 Luna changed that, and has better recall for overall errors than the Gemini models (while still maintaining the low hallucination false positive rate). It also is much cheaper.

The second is Perplexity releasing fast search, which reduces search costs to $1 per 1000 searches. Previously it was $2.50 per 1000 web searches (and for different providers ranged from $7 to $14 per 1000 searches). These two aspects reduced my average costs by a large margin (more than half), so I can now offer paper reviews for a dollar. And fast search does not degrade my benchmark data at all.

There are definitely areas that web search does not do as well for — non-English periodicals and more esoteric open source work. The result of this though is often my tool saying “Not Found”, which is intended for human review. (And looking at these, they are often hallucinations, so having a human review is well worth it.)

For editors interested in using VerusCite for reviews, get in touch. I am happy to gift credits for your team to try the tool out. It is worth it to spend a dollar per paper to ensure the accuracy of citations in published work.