Primate Vision vs. Sieve (2026): The Video API That Quietly Left the Market

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 — “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.

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, 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)

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)
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)
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) 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)

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:

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.
Enterprise — contact us 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.

† 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.

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 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 — 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.

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.