Q:

Bluemix alchemy api cost

I am confused about the cost of the alchemy api. I am trying to figure out the cost of 3000 requests but it looks as if each request costs $0.007 which seems rather expensive. or is it $0.007 per 1000 requests?

A:

You are referring to the standard pay per use plan. Basically the main concept is the API Event, not the request. 
As stated in Alchemy API Service terms:
Events are calculated for and included in the information returned by each API call. Calculations vary by the type of service:

Events related to the use of the IBM AlchemyLanguage API will be calculated based on the number of enrichments returned by the API. Many of the API calls require 1 event; some API calls require multiple events.
Events related to the use of the IBM AlchemyVision API will be calculated based on the number of enrichments returned by the API. Many of the API calls require 4 event; some API calls require multiple events.
Events related to the use of the IBM AlchemyData News API will be calculated based on the following facets:
a) the number of enrichments returned by the API; b) the volume of data returned by the API; and c) the length of time, as specified in the API call, used to determine the number of news objects included for analysis.

In the Free plan the customer is entitled to a free allotment of 1.000 API Events per day across all services. In the Standard plan you will be charged per API Event. 
The Standard plan is convenient when you need many concurrent calls.
If you are not deploying a large-scale application maybe using some cache services in the right way you can work in the free tier.
Take a look at Pricing for AlchemyAPI Services to read a detailed description of what is a transaction and how AlchemyAPI define those.

