Principles
The operating model behind Nodal's public product and API.
Nodal is built around a few product and API principles.
Workspace First
Most state belongs to a workspace: wallet funds, API keys, request logs, chat sessions, files, and knowledge collections. The active workspace determines what a signed-in app user sees, while bearer API keys carry their workspace association directly.
OpenAI-Compatible Where It Matters
The gateway exposes /v1/chat/completions, /v1/embeddings, and /v1/models with OpenAI-style request and response shapes. Nodal-specific behavior appears around billing, aliases, workspace scoping, and provider routing.
Prepaid And Auditable
Billable requests reserve funds before dispatch and write usage records after settlement. The app exposes wallet balance, ledger entries, usage summaries, receipts, and statements for workspace admins and owners.
Model Capability Awareness
Models can advertise capabilities such as streaming, vision, tools, and supported context length. Use capabilities to decide whether to send multimodal content, tool definitions, or structured output options.
Progressive Product Surface
The app and gateway share the same underlying model catalog, billing, files, and knowledge systems. Start with chat or API requests, then add workspaces, files, retrieval, and reusable prompts as your workflow grows.