Frequently asked questions
What Payinference is, what it never does, and how it fits above the payment stack you already run.
Payinference is payment decision infrastructure, a vendor-neutral decision layer that sits above your existing payment stack. Before a payment is sent for processing, your backend calls the Decision API and gets back one executable instruction, one of route, use default route, step-up, hold, retry, failover, or block. Your own PSPs, gateways and rails then execute it.
Deciding what should happen to a payment before it touches a rail. Payinference evaluates provider health, cost, risk and your merchant policy in real time and turns them into a single instruction with reason codes, so routing, retries, step-ups and blocks are deliberate, explainable decisions instead of static defaults.
No. Payinference never moves money, never charges cards and never holds funds. It returns an instruction; your own payment stack executes it. It is not a PSP, gateway, orchestrator or wallet.
Orchestrators sit in your payment flow and execute transactions across providers. Payinference sits above the flow and only decides. You keep your existing PSP integrations, contracts and settlement exactly as they are. Payinference tells your stack which action to take, and your stack carries it out.
No. The API accepts only safe payment context, such as amount, currency, country, payment method and network-level signals. Request schemas are strict and reject PANs, CVVs and customer identity at the boundary, so card data cannot enter the system even by accident.
The decision path is built for the authorization hot path. It computes from cached policy, cached provider health and cached pricing, with no PSP calls and no LLM calls, targeting under 50 ms at p95 with typical decisions around 1 ms.
Two endpoints. Your backend calls POST /v1/decision with safe payment context and receives one instruction. You execute that instruction through your own providers, then report what happened to POST /v1/outcomes so future decisions keep improving. A server-side SDK wraps both calls.
In shadow mode Payinference returns decisions and records what it would have done while your existing logic keeps executing, so you can evaluate decision quality against real traffic with zero risk. In enforce mode your stack executes the returned instruction.
Payinference is provider-neutral by design. Because it never calls a PSP itself, it needs no provider integration to work. Each decision request lists the providers available to you, and you execute the instruction through the stack you already run.
Per decision, never per dollar. Every account includes 1,000 free decisions a month; beyond that it's $0.05 per decision, dropping automatically to $0.04 above one million decisions a month, with committed-use pricing beyond ten million. No platform fee, no integration fee, and no percentage of your payment volume.
One call to POST /v1/decision. Reporting outcomes to /v1/outcomes is always free, and the first 1,000 decisions each month are included at no charge. Shadow and enforce decisions run the same decision path and are billed the same.