---
title: "Primate Vision vs. Sieve (2026): The Video API That Quietly Left the Market"
slug: "primate-vision-vs-sieve"
author: "Matt Miesnieks"
date: "2026-07-31"
readTime: "6 min read"
tags: ["Comparisons","Market Analysis"]
excerpt: "If you're comparing us against Sieve's video-processing API in 2026, there's news you may have missed: that API no longer exists. Sieve pivoted to selling training data to frontier labs. Here's what happened, what they sell now, and what to use instead."
canonical: https://primateintelligence.ai/blog/primate-vision-vs-sieve
---

If you arrived here comparing Primate Vision against Sieve's video-processing API, I have to start with news you may have missed: **that API no longer exists.**

Sometime between January and July 2026, Sieve (YC W22, formerly sievedata.com) pivoted out of the developer video-AI business entirely. Their site now redirects to [sieve.ai](https://www.sieve.ai/) — "The multimodal data lab" — a company that sells training datasets and environments to frontier AI labs, not APIs to developers. The docs site, the API endpoints, and the function-execution platform are gone from DNS. (Checks run 2026-07-31; the last archived capture of the docs host dates to 2022.)

What Sieve does now is genuinely impressive — embedding a billion videos to curate exabyte-scale training data is real engineering — but it's a different business, sold to a different buyer. If you're a model-training team shopping for licensed video data, Sieve is worth your call and I say so below. If you're a developer who needs to *analyze* video — ask a question of a stream or a file and get an answer you can act on — Sieve is no longer an option at any price. Primate Vision is the managed API built for exactly that.

*This is part of our [full 2026 video-AI landscape comparison](/blog/primate-vision-vs-video-ai-landscape-2026).*

---

## A category exit, not a comparison

Most posts in this library weigh two live products against each other. This one documents a departure.

As of 2026-07-31, `sievedata.com` auto-redirects to **sieve.ai**, which describes the company as building "the data and environments frontier AI labs use to train the next generation of multimodal systems" — datasets and custom collection for teams working on "generative media, robotics, computer use, world models, and agentic systems." ([sieve.ai](https://www.sieve.ai/), [about](https://www.sieve.ai/about)) The buyer is a research or training team at an AI lab, engaged through purchase agreements — not a developer with an API key.

The developer platform that used to compete in our category — video ingestion APIs, a marketplace of GPU-backed processing functions, dubbing, transcription, key-moment extraction, a Python SDK — has been decommissioned from the public internet. `docs.sievedata.com`, `api.sievedata.com`, and `mango.sievedata.com` no longer resolve in DNS. We could find **no shutdown announcement, no deprecation notice, and no public migration path** for existing API customers — labeled explicitly as unverified-by-absence, since a private grandfathered arrangement could exist. The pivot was visible on their homepage as early as January 2026, when a Wayback snapshot shows "Video datasets for frontier AI… 500K hours of high quality, diverse video clips" with a request-samples → purchase-agreement → bucket-delivery sales motion. ([Wayback, 2026-01-12](http://web.archive.org/web/20260112044936/https://www.sievedata.com/))

So this post answers the two questions people actually arrive with: *what does Sieve sell now, and who should buy it* — and *what should you use instead if you needed the thing they stopped selling.*

## The head-to-head

Scored against Sieve's **live** product — a dataset business. That's the only fair way to score it; legacy API capabilities from our earlier audit could not be re-verified and are treated as gone.

| Capability | Primate Vision | Sieve (sieve.ai, live product) |
|---|---|---|
| Video file upload API | ✅ MP4/MOV up to 2 GiB, presigned or URL ingest | ❌ no public upload API; legacy ingestion endpoints gone from DNS |
| Live stream input | ✅ managed WebRTC, native frame rate | ❌ never offered pre-pivot; nothing now |
| Real-time output | ✅ 45ms p50 / 316ms p95, 11.8 fps sustained, published | ❌ N/A — data delivered "within 1-2 days via storage bucket access" ([Wayback, Jan 2026](http://web.archive.org/web/20260112044936/https://www.sievedata.com/)) |
| Open-vocab NL prompting | ✅ core product | ❌ no public prompting surface |
| Verdict contract | ✅ deterministic yes/no/indeterminate + calibrated 0–1 confidence | ❌ N/A — no inference product |
| Timestamped segments | ✅ included with every analysis | ⚠️ only as annotations *inside purchased datasets* ("action metadata," time-synced shapes) |
| Evidence artifacts | ✅ annotated overlay evidence video + timestamped clips | ❌ N/A |
| Embeddings / semantic search | ❌ none | ⚠️ internal capability at extraordinary scale (1B videos, 41B vectors) — used for their own curation, **not sold as an API** ([Sieve blog, 2026-07-24](https://www.sieve.ai/blog)) |
| Webhooks / async jobs | ✅ Standard Webhooks signing, retries, redelivery + `Prefer: wait` | ❌ legacy job/webhook model unverifiable; API hosts dead |
| SDKs / docs | ✅ OpenAPI 3.1 on prod, npm + PyPI SDKs, public examples | ❌ no public docs site remains |
| Training-data supply at exabyte scale | ❌ not our business | ✅ **their entire business** — and they appear very good at it |

## What happened to the developer platform

Our April 2026 audit described a two-generation Sieve API: a V1 video-database API and a V2 function-execution platform with a marketplace of GPU-backed functions (dubbing, transcription, editing building blocks) and developer-friendly ergonomics. Honesty requires two admissions. First, **none of that is re-verifiable today** — every claim about it is stale, because the docs and API hosts are simply gone. Second, our April audit was likely already partially stale when written: the January 2026 Wayback capture shows the dataset pivot was already the homepage story months earlier.

Here's the part that matters if you're evaluating vendors in this category: we found no public deprecation notice or migration path for the platform's customers. Whether existing API users got a private wind-down is unverified. But if you build on video-AI infrastructure, "the vendor's docs site can vanish from DNS without a public announcement" is exactly the platform risk you're pricing in. It's fair to ask any vendor — including us — how they'd handle an exit. Our answer: a versioned API with model pinning (`darwin-1.3`), a published OpenAPI 3.1 contract served from the API itself, and published service expectations — the machinery that makes commitments auditable rather than vibes.

## What Sieve sells now — and it's genuinely good

No sandbagging: the new Sieve is doing hard things well. Their July 2026 engineering write-up describes embedding **one billion videos** and querying **41 billion vectors** to curate training data — frame deduplication, GPU selection, cost tradeoffs at a scale far beyond anything Primate Intelligence operates. ([Sieve blog](https://www.sieve.ai/blog)) They advertise custom data collection ("targeted real-world, digital, and simulated workflows"), dense annotation ("captions, transcripts, object labels, action metadata, camera signals, UI events, and custom schemas"), and compliance-first sourcing ("filtering, licensing, consent, retention, and permission requirements"), with SOC 2 Type 2 controls claimed on the homepage (certification status unverified — no public audit report or trust center). ([sieve.ai](https://www.sieve.ai/))

That last capability — licensing and consent management for training data at petabyte scale — is genuinely hard, and it positions Sieve upstream of the entire model-building world. They sell to the labs that build models like ours. As a *competitor for Primate Vision customers*, though, the honest assessment stands: **none anymore.** They no longer sell to our buyer.

## Pricing: one meter vs. no meter

**Sieve publishes no pricing at all.** There's no pricing page on the live site (the old `sievedata.com/pricing` URL 404s), and the sales motion is enterprise-style: request samples → enter a purchase agreement based on dataset volume and characteristics → receive data via storage bucket access. There is no processing service to normalize into $/minute or $/camera-hour — the honest table entry is "N/A — exited category."

**Primate Vision has two lanes**, stated plainly:

1. **Metered — $0.01 per second of source video** ($0.60/min), flat and fps-independent. Queued time free; failed jobs free. A 30-second clip → verdict + confidence + timestamped clips + annotated evidence video = $0.30. A `validate_only` dry-run estimates cost before you spend a credit.
2. **[Enterprise — contact us](https://primateintelligence.ai/pricing#enterprise)** for 24/7 continuous monitoring and camera fleets: dedicated capacity or on-site deployment at a small fraction of the metered rate, under highly discounted enterprise plans.

For cross-library consistency: the metered lane normalizes to $36/camera-hour†. With Sieve there's nothing to compare it against — but if you're weighing Primate against vendors still in the category, the full normalized table lives in the [hub post](/blog/primate-vision-vs-video-ai-landscape-2026).

† *Metered rate normalized for comparison. Primate does not sell 24/7 continuous monitoring at the metered rate — continuous and fleet workloads use enterprise plans; [contact us](https://primateintelligence.ai/pricing#enterprise).*

## Choose Sieve instead when…

Different market, real strengths — if you're their buyer, call them:

- **You're a model-training team buying licensed video/multimodal data.** Video generation, world models, robotics, computer-use agents — packaged datasets and custom collection with dense annotations is precisely what Sieve now builds, and their scale claims (500K-hour curated suites, petabytes of source video) are aimed squarely at you.
- **You need custom data collection with licensing and consent guarantees.** Real-world, simulated, and UI-interaction workflows collected to your spec, with the compliance machinery handled — a capability Primate Intelligence doesn't have and wouldn't replicate quickly.
- **You need a partner to curate petabyte-scale video into training-ready subsets.** Their embedding-a-billion-videos pipeline exists exactly for this.

And what Sieve can no longer do for you: analyze video in an application. If you were a legacy Sieve API customer — dubbing, transcription, function pipelines — there is no public successor product. For speech, dubbing, and audio workloads, look at transcription vendors or the big-cloud video indexers; Primate Vision is **not** a fit there either (we're visual-only, no audio path). For visual analysis — detection, monitoring, verdict-grade Q&A — read on.

## Choose Primate Vision when…

- **You need to ask a question of video and get an answer, managed, today.** One API call — upload up to 2 GiB or point us at a public https URL — returns a verdict from a closed vocabulary (`yes` / `no` / `indeterminate`), a calibrated 0–1 confidence score, and timestamped evidence. Not pipeline building blocks you assemble; an answer.
- **The camera is live.** Managed WebRTC ingest at native frame rates, with mid-stream prompt changes over one WebSocket message. Sieve never offered live input even pre-pivot; now there's no input at all.
- **You need proof, not just output.** Every yes ships with timestamped clips plus an annotated overlay evidence video a human can watch and forward.
- **Latency is a requirement, not a hope.** 45ms p50 / 316ms p95 per-frame inference, 11.8 fps sustained — published on a public [/performance](https://www.primateintelligence.ai/performance) page. Sieve's live product delivers data in 1–2 days by design; it's a different physics.
- **You want a vendor whose commitments are machine-auditable.** OpenAPI 3.1 served from the API, pinned model versions, webhooks with Standard-Webhooks signing and redelivery, a deterministic test mode for CI, and pricing you can compute before you run (`validate_only`).

## Try it

**[Try it for free](https://primateintelligence.ai/signup)** — real processing, no card required to start.

**Your AI agent can do it for you — right from Claude.** Primate Vision ships an MCP server, llms.txt, markdown docs twins, and a sandbox key available in a single POST — your agent can get a key, upload a clip, and read back a verdict without a human touching a dashboard.

For 24/7 monitoring and camera fleets: [see our enterprise plans](https://primateintelligence.ai/pricing#enterprise).

---

*Method note: every Sieve claim traces to their live site (sieve.ai), the January 2026 Wayback snapshot of sievedata.com, their 2026-07-24 blog post, and DNS checks — all accessed 2026-07-31. Items we could not verify — including any private continuation of the legacy API and the shutdown timeline — are labeled as unverified. Estimates are labeled.*