# Quick Overview

The Grid is a spot market for AI inference. Instead of picking a vendor and accepting their rate card, you pick a task type (text, code, or agent) and a quality tier (Standard, Prime, or Max). We route your request to a qualifying model from competing suppliers at a competitive market price. We're compatible with OpenAI Chat Completions and Anthropic Messages formats. Live pricing for each instrument is in the app at [thegrid.ai/pricing](https://thegrid.ai/pricing).

## Quick Links

| Page                                                                              | Contents                                                                                        |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| [**Start here**](/docs/start-here/introduction.md)                                | Introduction to The Grid, plus a 5-minute quickstart from sign-up to first call                 |
| [**Benefits**](/docs/benefits/benefits.md)                                        | Lower, competitive token costs, quality enforced inference delivery, without any vendor lock-in |
| [**Current instruments**](/docs/instrument-specifications/current-instruments.md) | The instruments live on The Grid today, with their Quality Score floors, latency, and limits    |
| [**Migrating**](/docs/integrations-and-best-practices/migrating-from-openai.md)   | Switch from your existing provider by changing three lines of code                              |
| [**Integrations**](/docs/integrations-and-best-practices/integrations.md)         | Use The Grid with your favorite AI tools and agent harnesses                                    |

## Machine-readable surfaces for agents and tools

We provide the following surfaces for programmatic discovery and automated setup by agents and agentic tools:

* **Consumption API:** one single API to consume inference via multiple instruments on The Grid. We support both OpenAI and Anthropic formats. For more details, check out the [reference](/docs/api-reference/consumption-api.md).
  * OpenAI Chat Completions base URL: `https://api.thegrid.ai/v1`. Point any OpenAI SDK or compatible client at it. Auth header: `Authorization: Bearer <key>`. Pass an instrument string (`text-prime`, `code-prime`, etc.) in place of a model name.
  * Anthropic Messages base URL (beta): `https://messages-beta.api.thegrid.ai/v1`. Point any Anthropic Messages client at it. Auth header: `x-api-key: <key>`. Same instrument strings, same key.
* **Integration guides**: see [Integrations](/docs/integrations-and-best-practices/integrations.md) for setup with tools like Cline, Continue, Claude Code, Kilo Code, OpenCode, and harnesses like OpenClaw, CrewAI, Deep Agents, DeerFlow, and Hermes.

## Support and troubleshooting

Questions, integration issues, or feedback: <support@thegrid.ai>. For common questions (account setup, billing, instrument selection, error codes), start with [Migration and best practices → Troubleshooting](/docs/integrations-and-best-practices/troubleshooting.md).


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Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.