Cohere: our review

Cohere is a Canadian company founded by former authors of the paper that launched Transformer models. It sells a language-model API — generation, search (Embed), ranking (Rerank) — with a stated positioning: serving businesses that want a contract and guarantees, not one more consumer chatbot.

A model builder, not just a reseller

Cohere trains its own models (the Command family) rather than reselling access to a third party's, which sets it apart from a router like OpenRouter. The offer covers three uses: Command for text generation, Embed for turning a document into a search vector, Rerank for ranking results by relevance. A business building an internal search engine or a document-sorting tool finds a catalogue built for that job, more than for conversation.

Pricing, generation by generation

The pricing grid clearly separates model generations. Command R7B, the newest and cheapest, charges $0.0375 per million input tokens and $0.15 for output — an entry-level rate. The previous generation stays in the catalogue at higher prices: Command R+ 04-2024 at $3.00 and $15.00, its August 2024 revision at $2.50 and $10.00. An older, pricier model still running in production isn't unusual for a vendor that guarantees API stability to its existing customers; it's still worth checking, before signing, which version the contract actually offers.

What the company promises, what the default doesn't cover

The security documentation highlights customer control over training and a SOC 2 Type II certification on the API infrastructure. That control does exist, but it's negotiated: an Enterprise account can request a DPA and exclude its data from any service-improvement use, while a trial or research account stays, by default, within a framework where inputs and outputs may feed internal research work. Processing region follows the same two-speed logic: the API infrastructure runs on Google Cloud in the United States, with transfers to Canada and the United Kingdom under the privacy policy, and it's only with a private deployment — customer VPC, on-premises, or Model Vault managed by Cohere — that a European region becomes possible.

Where it falls short

Two reservations to know before choosing Cohere for a sensitive project. The free trial key, first: it's explicitly banned in production, not a usable tier beyond testing. Second, without an Enterprise negotiation, no written guarantee fixes a processing region in Europe — a point that matters for a legal or healthcare sector required to document where its data lives.

Our recommendation

Cohere suits a technical team at a company ready to negotiate an Enterprise contract to get written guarantees on its data. Without that negotiating budget, or for a need for proven European hosting stated without detour, Scaleway or Hugging Face answer the question more directly.