As the name suggests, the business model of charging for access to an API was central to the company's identity and uncommon for its time: A TechCrunch article highlighted that even though the technology was similar to IBM's Watson, the pay-per-use model made it more accessible, especially to non-enterprise customers.
[2] In September 2011, ProgrammableWeb added AlchemyAPI to its API Billionaires Club, alongside giants such as Google and Facebook.
[9][10] As of February 2014 (prior to the IBM acquisition), it claimed to have clients in 36 countries and process over 3 billion documents a month.
IBM reported plans to integrate AlchemyAPI's deep learning technology into the core Watson platform [12] A February 2013 article in VentureBeat about big data named AlchemyAPI as one of the primary forces responsible for bringing natural language processing capabilities to the masses.
[13] In November 2013, GigaOm listed AlchemyAPI as one of the top startups working in deep learning, along with Cortica and Ersatz.