Find the Most Cost-Effective AI Token Plan

Input Gemma 4 31B $0.99/M, Z.ai GLM 4.7 $2.25/M, OpenAI GPT-OSS 120B $0.35/M, Llama 3.3 70B $0.60/M

Cerebras Inference

Output Gemma 4 31B $1.49/M, Z.ai GLM 4.7 $2.75/M, OpenAI GPT-OSS 120B $0.75/M, Llama 3.3 70B $0.60/M

❌ Proxy required (US-origin only) Free Tier

$5 trial credits on signup with access to every Cerebras-powered model; lower rate limits

Gemini Multimodal

Input Omni Flash: $0.15/M input tokens (multimodal); Nano Banana 2 Lite: $0.034/1K image tokens; Veo 3.1: $0.10/sec video

Output Omni Flash: $0.60/M output tokens (multimodal); Nano Banana Pro: $0.12/1K image tokens

❌ Proxy required (Google AI Studio not directly accessible from mainland China; requires stable proxy) Free Tier

Free tier: Gemini Omni Flash 15 RPM, Veo 3.1 2 generations/day, Imagen 4 10 images/day — no credit card required

Google Gemini

Input Gemini 4 Carbon/Argon: $2/M intro, $4/M after; 2.5 Pro: $1.25-10/M, 2.5 Flash: $0.15-1.25/M, 2.0 Flash: $0.10/M

Output Gemini 4 Carbon/Argon: $10/M intro, $20/M after; 2.5 Pro: $5-40/M, 2.5 Flash: $0.30-5/M, 2.0 Flash: $0.40/M

❌ Proxy required (Google Cloud not accessible in CN) Free Tier

Gemini 4 Carbon not yet public (Fairwind Program cohort only); Gemini 4 Argon paid-tier only; 2.5 Pro/Flash have free rate limits (15-30 RPM)

Cloudflare Workers AI

Input Neurons-based: $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons (after free tier); per-model token prices vary

Output Same Neurons billing; token price differs per model — Llama 3.3 70B $0.293/$2.253, GLM-5.3 $1.40/$4.40, DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.32/$3.96, GPT-OSS 120B $0.35/$0.75 per M tokens

❌ Mainland China edge unreachable (CF has no in-China GPU POPs); proxy required; ideal for overseas / HK-MO-TW / outbound-China workloads Free Tier

10,000 Neurons per day free on Workers Free plan

Perplexity AI

Input Sonar Pro: $3/M, Sonar: $1/M

Output Sonar Pro: $15/M, Sonar: $1/M

❌ Proxy required (Meta Model API public preview for US developers only; China access requires proxy) Free Tier

Meta Model API

Input $1.25/1M tokens

Output $4.25/1M tokens

Free tier: 60 RPM, 2M TPM; free credits on signup for US developers (public preview)

Exa

Input Pure pay-as-you-go, billed per endpoint and search-type. Search $7/1k requests (base 10 results) + $1/1k per extra result above 10 + $1/1k AI summaries; Contents $1/1k pages; Answer $5/1k; Monitors $15/1k; Deep Search $12-15/1k; Agent fixed effort $0.012-$1.00 per request or usage-based $0.10/ACU + tool calls (default $5 auto cap, $20 max cap). New accounts get $20 in free credits (~2,800 searches); Free Tier adds $10/month.

Output Same as input. Enterprise custom volume + Zero Data Retention + SLA + postpaid invoice billing.

❌ Proxy required for mainland China. Exa runs the primary API at https://api.exa.ai from a single-region US deployment. There is no documented ICP-registered mainland China endpoint as of 2026-08-30. Mainland China production traffic typically needs a proxy or relay; transpacific first-byte latency is usually 100-300 ms. Enterprise plans can negotiate custom routing and dedicated infrastructure for regulated workloads (HIPAA / GDPR data residency). Free Tier

Permanent $20 signup credit (~2,800 Search calls) + automatic $10 Free Tier monthly credit refill. No credit card required, no minimum spend. Free credits apply to every endpoint.

Mistral AI

Input Large 4: $0.70/M ($0.07 cached), Small 4: $0.15/M, Codestral: $0.30/M

Output Large 4: $2.10/M, Small 4: $0.60/M, Codestral: $0.90/M

Free API credits on signup on La Plateforme (within daily rate limits)

Cohere

Input Command R7: $2.50/M, Command R: $0.50/M, Embed: $0.10/M

Cohere

Output Command R7: $10/M, Command R: $1.50/M

Fireworks AI

Input Firefunction-v2: $0.90/M, Llama 3.3 70B: $0.90/M, DeepSeek-R1: $2.00/M

Fireworks AI

Output Firefunction-v2: $0.90/M, Llama 3.3 70B: $0.90/M, DeepSeek-R1: $2.00/M

Portkey

Input Free tier: 10,000 requests/month; Hobby $49/month (100K requests); Growth $249/month (1M requests); Enterprise contract

Portkey

Output Per-request billing, no token routing markup; BYOK free; logs/observability/caching gated by subscription tier

❌ Proxy required (portkey.ai is unstable from mainland China; self-hosted open-source edition recommended for CN teams) Free Tier

10,000 requests/month; 100K log retention; community Slack support; BYOK free; no credit card required

Black Forest Labs

Input FLUX.2 [pro]: $0.05/MP, FLUX.1.1 [pro]: $0.04/MP, FLUX.1 [schnell]: $0.003/MP, FLUX.1 Fill: $0.05/MP

Black Forest Labs

Output Flat per-megapixel billing, no tier-based markup

❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East + EU-Frankfurt deployment) Free Tier

Jina AI

Input Embeddings v3: $0.02/M tokens (10K free); Reranker v3: $0.018/M tokens (10K free); Reader: $0.02/M tokens (free up to 1M tokens); CLIP-v1: $0.02/M tokens

Jina AI

Output Flat per-million-token billing, no tier-based markup; batch discount of 50% available on all endpoints

❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East + EU-Frankfurt deployment) Free Tier

Groq

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.59/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.89/M, Mixtral 8x7B: $0.15/M

Groq

Output Llama 3.3 70B: $0.79/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.89/M, Mixtral 8x7B: $0.15/M

fal.ai

Input FLUX.2 [pro]: $0.05/MP (image), $0.08/sec (video); Kling 2.1: $0.10/sec; HunyuanVideo 1.5: $0.08/sec

fal.ai

Output Flat per-second / per-megapixel billing, no tier-based markup

❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East deployment) Free Tier

Cerebras

Input $0.10/M to $0.60/M tokens（所有模型统一 $0.60/M input）

Cerebras

Output $0.10/M to $0.60/M tokens（统一 $0.60/M output）

AI21 Labs (Jamba)

Input Jamba 1.5 Mini: $0.20/M tokens, Jamba 1.5 Large: $2/M tokens

AI21 Labs (Jamba)

Output Jamba 1.5 Mini: $0.20/M tokens, Jamba 1.5 Large: $2/M tokens

CoreWeave

Input GPU On-Demand hourly: NVIDIA HGX H100 $49.24, HGX H200 $50.44, HGX B200 $68.80, A100 80GB $21.60, L40S $18.00, L40 $10.00, GB200 NVL72 $42.00. Spot discounts: H100 $19.71, H200 $20.93, B200 $34.11, A100 $9.65. Serverless Inference bills per token via W&B Inference; Dedicated Inference bills on GPU-hour or node basis.

CoreWeave

Output

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Data centers concentrated in the US; expanded to Indonesia (first APAC region), UK (two operational data centers), and Sweden in 2026. China access requires proxy; cross-Pacific latency is high. Free Tier

No permanent free tier. Serverless Inference bills per token; GPU instances bill hourly (On-Demand) with spot discounts. The 0EM (Zero Egress Migration) program waives egress fees during migration into CoreWeave.

AI/ML API (AIMLAPI)

Input Per-1M-token list rates, many below first-party via aggregator volume discounts (verified aimlapi.com model pages 2026-09-07): Claude Sonnet 5 $2.60, GPT-5.2 $2.275, DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.5655, Gemini 3.6 Flash $1.95, Claude Fable 5 $13

AI/ML API (AIMLAPI)

Output Claude Sonnet 5 $13.00; GPT-5.2 $18.20; DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.131; Gemini 3.6 Flash $9.75; Claude Fable 5 $65

❌ No mainland-China endpoint/residency. api.aimlapi.com/v1 is a single global OpenAI-compatible endpoint fronted by Cloudflare; legal entities AIMLAPI OÜ (Estonia) + Boiler Labs FZ-LLC (Dubai) make the EU/GDPR angle strong, but mainland-China production traffic routes via proxy/relay. Free Tier

No permanent free tier — official FAQ: 'The Free Tier is currently paused.' Signup trial credits let you prototype (Developer $0 plan still advertises them) but there is no ongoing free allowance; then credit-based pay-as-you-go.

DeepInfra

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.49/M, DeepSeek-V3: $0.99/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1.09/M

DeepInfra

Output Llama 3.3 70B: $0.73/M, DeepSeek-V3: $0.99/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1.09/M

NVIDIA NIM

Input Partner-dependent (Nemotron-3 Ultra 550B: $0.50-0.90/1M tokens)

NVIDIA NIM

Output Partner-dependent (Nemotron-3 Ultra 550B: $1.70-3.60/1M tokens)

❌ Proxy required (US-based platform, export control restrictions apply) Free Tier

Free serverless API endpoints for prototyping (no credit card required, generate API key to start)

Amazon Bedrock

Input Claude Sonnet 4.5: $6/M, DeepSeek V3.2: $0.62/M, Mistral Large 3: $0.50/M, GPT-5.5: $5.50/M, GPT-5.4: $2.75/M, Grok 4.3: $1.25/M, Qwen3 235B: $0.23/M, Kimi K2.5: $0.60/M

Amazon Bedrock

Output Claude Sonnet 4.5: $30/M, DeepSeek V3.2: $1.85/M, Mistral Large 3: $1.50/M, GPT-5.5: $33/M, GPT-5.4: $16.50/M, Grok 4.3: $2.50/M, Qwen3 235B: $0.91/M, Kimi K2.5: $3/M

❌ Proxy/VPN required for mainland China users (Bedrock not available in AWS China regions) Free Tier

AWS Free Tier offers up to $200 credits for new customers (valid 6 months). No permanent free tier for Bedrock.

Hyperbolic

Input Per-token inference scaled from market GPU rates; H100 from $2.89/GPU-hour, H200 $3.49/GPU-hour

Hyperbolic

Output Pay-as-you-go GPU compute billed per hour; reserved discounts for committed capacity

No permanent free tier and no long-term lock-in. On-demand GPUs are pay-as-you-go billed per hour, with no quota limits and no minimum commitment to start.

Fireworks AI

Input Serverless (Standard, $/1M tokens): DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.74, V4 Flash $0.22, Kimi K3 $3.00, K2.7 Code $0.95, MiniMax M3 $0.30, Qwen 3.7 Plus $0.40, GPT OSS 120B $0.15, GLM 5.1 $1.40. Embeddings $0.008-$0.016/1M by tier. On-demand GPUs per hour: H100 $7.00, H200 $7.00, B200 $10.00, B300 $12.00, GB300 $18.00 (rising Sep 1).

Fireworks AI

Output Serverless output ($/1M): DeepSeek V4 Pro $3.48, V4 Flash $0.66, Kimi K3 $15.00, MiniMax M3 $1.20, Qwen 3.7 Plus $1.60, GPT OSS 120B $0.60, GLM 5.1 $4.40. Cached input far lower (DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.145). Training: SFT $0.50/1M train tokens (≤16B) to $10.00 (>300B); Serverless Training API bills tokens only, no idle GPU cost.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. As a US-based platform, direct access from the mainland requires proxy or relay; cross-Pacific first-byte latency typically 150-250ms. Closest APAC endpoint is the Tokyo multi-region. Free Tier

$1 in free serverless credits on signup (pay-per-token, postpaid billing); no permanent free tier. On-demand GPUs and training bill by usage.

Replicate

Input 模型调用按运行时长 + GPU 型号计费，$0.00025/s/A100起步

Replicate

Output 按运行时长计费（非 token 计费模式）

SambaNova

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M, Qwen 72B: $0.40/M

SambaNova

Output Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M, Qwen 72B: $0.40/M

Nebius

Input Per-token OpenAI-compatible inference: DeepSeek-V4-Flash $0.14/M input, $0.28/M output; Kimi K3 $3/$15; MiniMax M3 $0.30/$1.20; Llama 3.3 70B $0.13/$0.40

Nebius

Output Two flavors per model - Base and Fast (-fast suffix) - same outputs, Fast trades higher token price for lower latency via speculative decoding

No setup fee and no monthly subscription. Token Factory is pay-as-you-go per token, with elastic dynamic rate limits that auto-scale up to 20x your base allocation as sustained usage grows - no capacity reservation needed to start.

Inception AI Mercury

Input Mercury 2.5 (Preview): $0.20/M (cached $0.02/M, output $0.75/M); Mercury 2 / Mercury Edit 2: $0.25/M input (cached $0.025/M) + $0.75/M output

Inception AI Mercury

Output All Mercury models: $0.75/M output at list; Mercury 2.5 Preview is currently discounted on OpenRouter at ~$0.04/M in / $0.15/M out (launch promo, context 260K)

❌ Proxy required (US-origin API, Redwood City CA) Free Tier

100M free tokens for every new account (no payment details required)

Anyscale

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.39/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1/M, Mixtral 8x22B: $0.90/M

Anyscale

Output Llama 3.3 70B: $0.39/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1/M, Mixtral 8x22B: $0.90/M

New users get $100 in one-time free credits; small project starter credits ($3-$5) are also available.

DigitalOcean Gradient

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M

DigitalOcean Gradient

Output Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M

New accounts get $200 in credits valid for 60 days. There is no permanent free tier; after the credit window, serverless inference bills per token (starting around $0.20 per 1M for the smallest hosted model) and GPU Droplets bill by the hour.

Sakana AI

Input Fugu Max: $2/M (fixed any context); Fugu Ultra v2: $5/M standard (≤272K) or $10/M long context (>272K)

Sakana AI

Output Fugu Max: $6/M (fixed); Fugu Ultra v2: $30/M standard or $45/M long context

❌ Proxy required (Japan-origin API) Free Tier

Self-serve signup at console.sakana.ai; pay-as-you-go Token Plan; no upfront payment required

Stability AI

Input SD3.5: $0.0065/image, SDXL: $0.01/image, Stable Code: $0.50/M tokens

Stability AI

Output 按图像/视频/音频输出计费，非 token 计费

Pika API

Input $10/mo membership + $10 first-month credit. Pay-as-you-go wholesale per-model rates: GPT Image 2.0 $22.50/1M tokens; Seedance 2.0 R2V 480P $0.0903/sec; MiniMax H3 T2V 2K $0.13/sec

Pika API

Output GPT Image 2.0 images $22.50/1M tokens; Seedream 5.0 Pro 2K $0.09/image; Nano Banana Pro $0.134/image; audio billed per minute / request / 1k chars; video per second

❌ Proxy required (Pika Labs US service, no mainland China direct access) Free Tier

No free API tier on the consumer plan. API Club gives a $10 first-month usage credit, but requires the $10/mo membership to unlock wholesale member pricing

Ideogram

#20

Ideogram

Input Ideogram 3.0: $0.04/image (standard), $0.08/image (Turbo)

Output 4 images per generation (default), additional images via paid credits

Input GPU instance on-demand per GPU/hr: NVIDIA B200 SXM6 $6.69, H100 SXM $3.99, A100 SXM 80GB $2.79, A100 SXM 40GB $1.99, GH200 $2.29, A100 PCIe $1.99, A6000 $1.09, A10 $1.29, V100 $0.79. 1-Click Cluster reserved per GPU/hr: B200 $9.86 (16 GPU) down to $8.87 (256+), H100 $6.16 down to $5.54. Superclusters / Private Cloud (4000+ GPUs) via sales. No egress fees.

Lambda

#20

Lambda

Output Billed by the second per GPU instance (no idle GPU cost); clusters and reserved capacity carry a minimum commitment (2 weeks to 1 year). Managed orchestration: Managed Kubernetes and Slurm included at no extra per-node fee; Lambda Stack one-line install. No per-token inference pricing — Lambda's Inference API is winding down; self-hosted inference billed as GPU runtime.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint; data centers in the US (California and other regions), China access requires proxy or overseas relay. Free Tier

No permanent free GPU tier; usage-based billing after signup (GPU instances billed per second). 1-Click Clusters and Superclusters require prepaid / committed terms (2 weeks to 1 year).

Luma AI

#21

Luma AI

Input Credit-based subscription. Plans: Plus $30/mo (10,000 credits), Pro $90/mo (40,000 credits), Ultra $300/mo (150,000 credits). Ray 3.2 video: 1080p text-to-video 400 credits/5s, 720p 100 credits/5s, Draft 20 credits/5s; Seedance 2.0 1080p 240 credits/sec, 4K 959 credits/sec.

Output Image credits: Uni-1 30 credits/image, Seedream 1-3 credits/image, GPT Image 2 from 3 (Low-1K) to 255 (High-4K) credits. Audio: ElevenLabs v3 TTS 21 credits/1,000 chars. Utilities: background removal 1 credit/image, reframe video 32 credits/sec, upscale to 4K 17 credits/sec.

❌ Proxy required (no mainland China direct access; API served from global AWS/GCP edge regions) Free Tier

No permanent free API tier. New users get a small one-time free credit grant on the platform, but sustained API usage requires at least the Plus plan at $30/mo (10,000 credits).

Runway

Input Gen-4 Turbo: 50 credits/5s clip (~$0.50), Gen-4 Alpha: 100 credits/5s (~$1.00), Act-Two: 150 credits/5s (~$1.50), Frames: 200 credits/sequence (~$2.00)

Runway

Output Credit-based system (~$0.01/credit). Credit packs: $12 (1,000 credits) to $200 (25,000 credits). Enterprise: custom pricing.

❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East + GCP US-Central hosting) Free Tier

No free API tier. Minimum $12 for 1,000 credits (~20 Gen-4 Turbo clips). Free web app available but no API access.

TwelveLabs

Input Free plan: 600 minutes of video indexing at no cost. Pegasus 1.2 video indexing $0.042/min (one-time), input video $0.021/min, output text $0.0075/1k tokens, embedding infrastructure $0.0015/indexed minute/month. Developer plan upgrades indexes past 90 days and unlocks higher rate limits.

TwelveLabs

Output Identical per-minute and per-1k-tokens billing. Marengo embeddings billed by indexed minute. No subscription fee on Developer plan beyond per-usage costs.

❌ Proxy required (no mainland China direct endpoint; API hosted on AWS us-west-2 / us-east-1; SDKs available in Python / Node / Go / Java) Free Tier

Free plan: 600 minutes of free video indexing on signup (cumulative, no credit card required). Full API surface available (Pegasus 1.2 / 1.5, Marengo 3.0, Search, Embed, Analyze & Segment). Index retention is 90 days on Free; upgrading to Developer lifts retention to unlimited.

Mixedbread AI

Input Usage-based across three buckets: Indexing (Fast $1.50/1M content tokens; High Quality with OCR/transcription/summaries/multimodal enrichment $3/1M), Search (Grep $0.10/1K queries, Semantic $4/1K, Toast 1 $1/1K; rerank adds $3.50 or $1.50/1K), and Storage $0.50/1M content tokens per month. Toast 1 also bills input $0.50/1M LLM tokens (launch $0.30).

Mixedbread AI

Output Toast 1 output $1.20/1M LLM tokens (launch $0.72, 40% off); cached input $0.06/1M (launch $0.036), cache writes free. Semantic search rerank adds $3.50/1K queries.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Mixedbread is a US/Europe-based platform (legal entity mixedbread ai inc., Berlin/San Francisco), so direct access from the mainland requires a proxy or relay, with cross-Pacific first-byte latency typically 150-250ms. Free Tier

Starter plan grants $5 in one-time credits with no card required; 3 workspace users, 10 stores, 100 requests/minute — enough to evaluate a real corpus. No permanent free tier.

Crusoe

#23

Crusoe

Input Pay-as-you-go per 1 million tokens, four parameter-count tiers: <16B ($0.40) / 16B-70B ($2.50) / 70B-300B ($6.00) / >300B ($10.00). Serverless Fine-Tuning uses the identical 4-tier structure. Managed Inference covers DeepSeek V3 0324, V4 Pro, V4 Flash, GLM 5.1/5.2, GPT-OSS 20B/120B, Gemma 4 31B-it, Kimi K2.6, Llama 3.1 8B / 3.3 70B, Nemotron 3 family (VoiceChat/Ultra 550B/3.5 Lightning/3 Nano/3 Super/Nano Omni 30B), Qwen3 8B/235B A22B Instruct 2507/Qwen3.5 2B+9B/Qwen3.6 35B A3B, Yutori n1.5. Cached tokens billed at $0.03-$1.50 per 1M.

Output Self-Serve Deployments: NVIDIA H100 80GB HGX $5.50/hr, NVIDIA H200 141GB HGX $6.00/hr (dedicated endpoints for open and fine-tuned models). Tailored Deployments and Provisioned Throughput negotiated via sales. Managed Kubernetes $0.10/cluster-hour; Container Registry $0.10/GiB-month; Object Storage $0.06/GiB-month.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Managed Inference API hosted at Crusoe's US data centers (Colorado, Texas, and other US locations); China access requires proxy. Free Tier

No permanent free tier; pay-as-you-go only. Volume discounts via sales contact. Serverless Fine-Tuning starts at $0.40/M tokens for sub-16B models.

Letta

#23

Letta

Input Usage-based: Free $0 (up to 3 stateful agents, BYOK), Pro $20/mo (up to 20 agents, Letta Auto weekly + monthly quota + pay-as-you-go overage), Teams Pro per seat (shared agents + permissions), Developer Plan API-key billing with pure credit usage (no agent cap), Enterprise sales-quoted (self-hosting / custom models). Server-side tools bill CPU time at $0.00015/sec.

Output Letta Auto usage above the Pro plan's included quota falls back to pay-as-you-go at the model's listed rate (see platform.letta.com/models). Mods, Skills, and Conversations are included in plans, not billed separately. Remote MCP tools run on the MCP provider — no Letta credit cost.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Letta, Inc. is registered in San Francisco and platform.letta.com is a single global endpoint, so production traffic from mainland China requires a proxy or relay (typical cross-Pacific first-byte latency ~150-250ms). The agent harness is fully open-source (Apache-2.0), so self-hosting on your own infrastructure is a viable workaround. Free Tier

Free $0/mo with up to 3 stateful agents and BYOK; Letta Auto and Skills are throttled — usable for evaluation and small personal-assistant use cases.

Reka

#25

Reka

Input Reka Edge $0.10/M input; Reka Flash $0.80/M; Reka Core $2.00/M; Reka Flash Research bills per 1K requests ($25 standard, $35 parallel-low, $60 parallel-high). Pure usage-based with no minimum commitment.

Output Reka Edge $0.10/M; Reka Flash $2.00/M; Reka Core $6.00/M. Multimodal usage (image, video, audio) bills separately per minute: Flash video $0.06/min, Core $0.08/min; images billed per call (Flash $0.01, Core $0.02).

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Reka is registered at 530 Lawrence Expressway, Sunnyvale, CA; api.reka.ai is a single global endpoint, so production traffic from mainland China requires a proxy or relay (typical cross-Pacific first-byte latency ~150-250ms). The open weights can be self-hosted on NVIDIA GPUs with ≥24GB VRAM via vLLM to bypass direct-access limits. Free Tier

Sign up at platform.reka.ai to obtain an API key; billing is purely pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment, so teams can prototype with a small top-up. No permanent free tier or monthly free credit.

Aleph Alpha

Input Enterprise contract — no public per-token price (quote-based; PhariaAI on-prem deployment custom-priced)

Aleph Alpha

Output Same — enterprise quote, no public per-token list

❌ Not applicable (German sovereign-AI vendor, subject to EU export controls) Free Tier

No public free tier — self-serve signup creates an account, but pricing is enterprise contract only

Modal

Input Per GPU-second: H100 $0.001097/s, A100 80GB $0.000694/s, T4 $0.000164/s

Modal

Output Same as input (per GPU-second, no idle fees)

❌ Proxy required (infrastructure on AWS/GCP overseas regions; direct CN access unreliable) Free Tier

AssemblyAI

#30

AssemblyAI

Input Per audio hour: Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hr, Universal-2 $0.15/hr (pre-recorded)

Output N/A (speech-to-text billed on audio duration, no token concept)

❌ Proxy required (US-based infrastructure, CN direct access unreliable) Free Tier

Together AI

#39

Together AI

Input $0.03-$1.74/MTok (model-dependent)

Output $0.12-$4.50/MTok (model-dependent)

❌ Proxy required (US-based service) Free Tier

$1 initial credit on signup (requires payment method)

Nscale

Input Nscale uses credit-based pay-as-you-go billing with per-model rates quoted per 1M input tokens (text models) in the Nscale Console (AI Services → Models) and via the /v1/models API endpoint; image models bill input as 0. The pricing structure is verified against the ModelPricing schema in serverless-openapi.yaml (input = USD per 1M input tokens).

Output Output bills per 1M output tokens (text models); image models bill per million output pixels (ModelPricing.output defined as per-million output pixels). Exact per-model USD rates are shown in the Console and /v1/models once you top up credit.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. inference.api.nscale.com is a single global endpoint; data centers concentrate in Europe (Loughton UK, Glomfjord/Narvik Norway) and the US (Texas, West Virginia), so China production traffic needs a proxy and transatlantic/transpacific first-byte latency is typically 200-350ms. The platform emphasizes EU data sovereignty and in-country processing, which suits European compliance workloads more than China-region low latency. Free Tier

No permanent free tier. New users sign up via Google SSO; the quickstart notes early users may be eligible for free promotional credits (not guaranteed). By default you must top up credit before calling the serverless inference API.

Morph

#41

Morph

Input Per-model billing quoted per 1M input tokens (text models). Verified against docs.morphllm.com llms.txt Fast Models table (2026-08-28): Kimi K3 $2.90, Qwen 3.5 397B $0.50, GLM-5.2 744B $1.10, GLM-5.3-Flash $0.15, MiniMax M3 $0.30, MiniMax M2.7 $0.279, DeepSeek V4 Flash (beta) $0.12, Qwen 3.8/3.6 27B $0.289, Gemma 4 31B $0.14. Qwen 3.5 397B cached input bills at $0.30 per 1M; other models have no separate cache rate. Fast Apply via the `auto` model bills at OpenRouter-verified rates (morph-v3-fast $0.0008/$0.0012 per 1k, morph-v3-large $0.0009/$0.0019 per 1k); Compact, Reflexes, WarpGrep, and Router bill per event (see dedicated sections below).

Output Per-model billing quoted per 1M output tokens (text models). Verified against docs.morphllm.com llms.txt: Kimi K3 $14.00, Qwen 3.5 397B $3.50, GLM-5.2 744B $4.10, GLM-5.3-Flash $0.50, MiniMax M3 $1.20, MiniMax M2.7 $1.20, DeepSeek V4 Flash (beta) $0.278, Qwen 3.8/3.6 27B $2.40, Gemma 4 31B $0.40. Fast Apply output is morph-v3-fast $1.20 / morph-v3-large $1.90 per 1M tokens; the recommended `auto` route bills per the routed model. GLM-5.2 `service_tier: standby` runs at the same per-token rates (best-effort capacity, no SLA, returns 429 with `Retry-After` when over 25% utilization).

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Base URL https://api.morphllm.com is a single global endpoint, hosted by AutoInfra, Inc. (YC-backed US company). OpenRouter routes morph/morph-v3-fast and morph/morph-v3-large through multi-region, but the official Morph API is not available from mainland China without a proxy. China production traffic sees typical 200-400 ms transpacific first-byte latency. Free Tier

No permanent free tier (no zero-cost starter plan). New signups get an API key and are billed pay-as-you-go from the first token. Morph offers up to $5,000 in Startup Credits for qualified startups, applied via a separate sales contact form (morphllm.com home page). The homepage CTA 'Start free. Get API Key' refers to signup friction, not to a free quota.

Firecrawl

#42

Firecrawl

Input Pure credit-based billing, consumption per endpoint and feature, monthly reset per plan; extra credits sold in $5 batches (1k–5k credits per batch depending on plan). Verified against firecrawl.dev/pricing + docs.firecrawl.dev/billing.md (2026-08-29): Free 1k credits/mo at $0; Hobby 5k at $19/mo ($16/mo billed yearly); Standard 100k at $83/mo (yearly ~$99/mo); Growth 500k at $333/mo (yearly ~$399/mo); Scale 1M at $599/mo; Enterprise Custom. Per-call credit costs: Scrape / Crawl / Map 1 cr/page, Search 2 cr/10 results (rounded up), Monitor 1 cr/page/check, Interact 2 cr/minute (Playwright) or 7 cr/minute (prompt-driven, 1-min minimum). Batch Scrape and Extract inherit the same per-URL / per-call credit costs. Agent gives 5 daily runs free, then dynamic usage-based pricing.

Output No separate output dimension — Firecrawl returns scraped markdown / HTML / JSON content, billed only against the input credit cost and concurrent-browser occupancy. The data returned is not separately metered; the only output-side caveat is enterprise ZDR Search, which carries a custom rate negotiated per contract.

❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Firecrawl is headquartered in San Francisco (Y Combinator W23 batch) with a single-region API base URL at https://api.firecrawl.dev; the billing and rate-limits docs do not list any Asia-Pacific or China routing layer. China production traffic requires a proxy or transit, with typical 200-400 ms transpacific first-byte latency. The Free tier's 1,000 credits work behind a proxy for evaluation, but stable production traffic should either run a self-hosted Firecrawl deployment (Docker / Kubernetes) or sit behind a corporate proxy. Free Tier

Permanent Free tier: 1,000 credits per month with no credit card required, full access to Scrape / Crawl / Map / Search / Batch Scrape / JSON mode and every other endpoint; 2 concurrent browsers and a 50,000 max queued jobs ceiling. Designed for evaluation and low-volume use; credits reset at the start of each month and do not roll over. Agent's 5-daily-free runs apply across every plan, including Free.

Chutes

#44

Chutes

Input Per-token pay-as-you-go, quoted per 1M input tokens (verified on chutes.ai/api/models 2026-09-06): Qwen3.5-397B-A17B $0.45, DeepSeek-V3.2 $1.00, DeepSeek-V4-Flash $0.44, Kimi-K2.6 $0.58, GLM-5.2 $1.25, Qwen3-32B $0.104, Gemma-4-31B $0.12, Qwen3.6-27B $0.30, Qwen3.8-27B $0.32

Output Per 1M output: Qwen3.5-397B $3.00, DeepSeek-V3.2 $1.00, DeepSeek-V4-Flash $1.32, Kimi-K2.6 $3.40, GLM-5.2 $3.95, Qwen3-32B $0.416, Gemma-4-31B $0.37, Qwen3.8-27B $2.50

❌ Proxy required for mainland China. Chutes is a decentralized, Bittensor-powered inference network for open-weights models, served behind a single global endpoint (https://llm.chutes.ai). There is no mainland-China regional endpoint, no China payment method, and no CN data-residency option; mainland production traffic needs a proxy or aggregator. Free Tier

No free tier — the official FAQ states 'We do not offer a free tier at this time. Top up your account in the app.' Pure pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment; optional monthly subscriptions Plus $10/mo (6% off beyond quota) and Pro $20/mo (10% off) bundle a daily request quota. 25+ Stripe payment methods (crypto, cards, bank transfers) plus TAO / Bittensor alpha tokens are accepted.

🌐

Global APIs with Partial China Access

China: works but unstable

Works from China for some users; quality and uptime may vary. Check provider status before committing.

Apache-2.0 OSS tier is free forever (Docker / K8s / Go binary / npx); 14-day Enterprise free trial

Hugging Face

Input Free $0.10 inference credits, then $0.05-$3.00/M tokens depending on model via Inference Providers; PRO $9/mo includes 20x more inference credits; Enterprise $2/seat/mo

Output Same as input per Inference Provider; multi-provider rate cards visible on huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing

⚠️ huggingface.co blocked in mainland China; workarounds include hf-mirror.com mirror or self-hosted Inference Endpoints on a domestic cloud (Alibaba / Tencent) Free Tier

$0.10 monthly inference credits for free users; 200,000+ models readable; Spaces + Datasets free hosting; Inference API rate-limited

Vercel AI Gateway

Input Free tier: $5/mo AI Gateway Credits; Paid: pay-as-you-go at provider list rates with zero markup

Output Zero markup on tokens (incl. BYOK); add-on features billed separately

⚠️ Proxy required (China needs VPN) Free Tier

$5/month free AI Gateway Credits per team (Free-Tier eligible models only)

Eden AI

Input Pay the provider's exact list price + a 5.5% Eden AI platform fee per API call

Eden AI

Output Same: provider's exact list price, no markup. Each API response includes the exact cost in USD.

⚠️ HQ in France; EU endpoint (api.eu.edenai.run) keeps data in Europe for GDPR/AI Act. Mainland China access typically requires overseas egress (200-400ms avg latency). Free Tier

No subscription — buy prepaid credits via Stripe at any size; Self-serve plan default 10 req/sec (upgradable to 15 req/sec on request)

IBM watsonx.ai

Input Per-1M-token input pricing spans $0.06 (Granite 4 H Small) to $3.00 (Mistral Large / Mistral Medium 2505) per Calcaas's 2026-09 catalog

IBM watsonx.ai

Output Per-1M-token output pricing spans $0.10 (Granite Guardian 3.2 2B / Llama 3.2 1B) to $10.00 (Mistral Large / Mistral Medium 2505) per Calcaas's 2026-09 catalog

⚠️ IBM watsonx.ai hosts data centers in us-south / us-east (US) and eu-de / eu-gb (EU); mainland China access requires overseas egress (200-400ms typical latency); Enterprise tier supports on-prem deployment on IBM Z / LinuxONE to bypass cross-border routing Free Tier

New IBM Cloud accounts receive trial credits (amount varies by promotion); Lite plan includes a limited free monthly call quota for model evaluation

Thinking Machines (Inkling)

Input Tinker serverless inference (256K tier): Inkling-Small $0.30/M, Inkling $1.00/M; cached input $0.06/M and $0.17/M respectively. Tinker training (64K / 256K tiers): Inkling prefill $1.87/$3.74, Inkling-Small $0.58/$1.16 (all limited-time 50% off; original rates are double)

Thinking Machines (Inkling)

Output Serverless inference (256K tier): Inkling-Small $1.20/M, Inkling $4.05/M. Training sample rates: Inkling $4.68 at 64K / $9.36 at 256K, Inkling-Small $1.44 / $2.89; train rates: Inkling $5.61 at 64K (original $11.22) / $11.23 at 256K, Inkling-Small $1.73 / $3.47

⚠️ No mainland China endpoint — proxy required; weights are downloadable for self-hosting Free Tier

Fully open weights on Hugging Face — self-hosting is a zero-API-cost path

Novita AI

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.59/M, DeepSeek-V3: $1.00/M

Novita AI

Output Llama 3.3 70B: $0.79/M, DeepSeek-V3: $1.00/M

⚠️ Partial (Singapore node, acceptable latency from China) Free Tier

Baseten

Input Per-second GPU billing (H100: $1.89/hr, A100: $0.83/hr, L40S: $0.54/hr)

Baseten

Output Model-dependent (inference time × GPU rate)

⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China) Free Tier

$30 in inference credits on signup (valid 30 days); custom model hosting free tier: 1 deployed model

Tavily

Input Free 1,000 credits/month (rolling 30-day window, no credit card); Pay-as-you-go $0.008/credit (base Search 1 credit); Project from $30/month with 4,000 credits, $0.008/credit overage; Growth $200/month with 40,000 credits, $0.006/credit overage; Pro $1,000/month with 250,000 credits, $0.005/credit overage; Enterprise contract (custom quota + SLA + no-logs addendum)

Tavily

Output Per-endpoint billing: Search 1 credit/call; Extract 1 credit/page; Crawl 1 credit/page; Map 1 credit/page; Research 5 credits/call (replaces 5-10 Search + 2-3 Extract + 1 synthesis LLM); AI Extraction 1 credit/call

⚠️ Tavily API hosted on AWS US-East / EU-West; direct access from mainland China 200-400ms latency; recommended Cloudflare Worker or Tencent Cloud Edge Function proxy (50-100ms); no CN node planned; no domestic payment channels Free Tier

Free forever: 1,000 credits/month (rolling 30-day window), no credit card, no feature gating; Search/Extract/Crawl/Map/AI Extraction each have separate quotas (1,000 Search + 500 Crawl); overage returns HTTP 429, no surprise billing

Lepton AI

Input Llama 3.3 70B: $0.80/M; Llama 3.1 405B: $3.50/M; Qwen 2.5 72B: $0.80/M; DeepSeek-R1: $2.00/M

Lepton AI

Output Same rate as input for most models (symmetric pricing)

⚠️ Partially available (ap-northeast-1 Tokyo region is closest; China access requires proxy) Free Tier

$5 in credits valid for 30 days (enough to fully evaluate any flagship model)

ElevenLabs

#20

ElevenLabs

Input TTS: $0.03-0.30/1K chars depending on model/quality; STT: $0.47/hour; Sound Effects: $0.04/request

Output Same as input rate per model

⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China) Free Tier

Deepgram

#21

Deepgram

Input STT: $0.0043-0.012/min; TTS: $0.015-0.030/1K chars

Output N/A

⚠️ Partially available (proxy required, no mainland China data center) Free Tier

RunPod

#21

RunPod

Input Per-second GPU: H100 SXM $2.99/hr, A100 SXM $1.49/hr, B200 $5.89/hr, L40S $0.99/hr, RTX 4090 $0.69/hr

Output Same as input (per-GPU-second — no idle fees, no egress fees)

⚠️ Partially available (31 global regions; CN direct access unstable — proxy recommended) Free Tier

$5 starter credit on signup, no credit card required; per-second billing means spiky workloads never pay for idle

Voyage AI

Input voyage-4-large: $0.12/M, voyage-4: $0.06/M, voyage-4-lite: $0.02/M, voyage-context-3: $0.18/M, voyage-code-3: $0.18/M, voyage-multimodal-3.5: $0.12/M

Voyage AI

Output （embedding API — no output tokens; rerank-2.5: $0.05/M tokens, rerank-2.5-lite: $0.02/M tokens）

⚠️ Partial (site accessible from China, API stability in mainland China unverified) Free Tier

200M free tokens per account (text embedding + reranker), 50M free tokens for legacy domain models

Poolside

Input Laguna S 2.1: $0.09/M input; Laguna XS 2.1: $0.06/M input; cached input $0.009/M and $0.003/M respectively (10x cache discount on both)

Poolside

Output Laguna S 2.1: $0.18/M output; Laguna XS 2.1: $0.12/M output

⚠️ No mainland China endpoint — proxy required; weights are downloadable for self-hosting under OpenMDW-1.1 license Free Tier

OpenRouter hosts rate-limited free Laguna S 2.1 :free and Laguna XS 2.1 :free variants; chat.poolside.ai browser sandbox needs no signup

Weaviate

#24

Weaviate

Input Free forever: 100,000 objects + 1 collection + 7-day backup; Flex monthly from $45 + $0.00465/1M vector dim + $0.12/GiB storage; Premium prepaid from $400/mo

Output Dedicated contract from $400/mo; separate dimensions of vector dim, storage, backup billed independently; Embeddings billed per token

⚠️ Servers in AWS/GCP regions, ~200-400ms latency from China Free Tier

Free forever: 100,000 objects, 1 collection, 7-day backup; 2,000 Embedding requests/day; Query Agent 1,000 req/mo

Writer

#25

Writer

Input Palmyra X5: $0.60/M, Palmyra X4: $2.50/M

Output Palmyra X5: $6.00/M, Palmyra X4: $10.00/M

⚠️ Partial (site accessible from China, API stability unverified) Free Tier

14-day free trial, no credit card required (Starter plan)

Qdrant

#26

Qdrant

Input Free forever: 1 GB storage + 0.5M vectors; Cloud Standard from $25/mo (prepaid $250/yr) with $0.06/GB-mo storage; Cloud Pro from $80/mo with $0.04/GB-mo + high IOPS; Dedicated contract from $2,500/mo

Output Storage + optional Power Tier billing; no per-API-call fees, no per-vector embedding fees; FastEmbed runs locally per token; BYO embeddings billed by third-party API

⚠️ Cloud runs on AWS Frankfurt / N. Virginia / Sydney regions, ~200-400ms latency from mainland China; OSS can be self-hosted in Tencent/Aliyun CN regions Free Tier

Free forever: 1 GB storage + 0.5M 1015-dim vectors; 2 CPU/0.5 GiB RAM instance; unlimited API requests; community Discord support

Cartesia

Input Sonic: $0.03/1K chars (Standard), $0.06/1K chars (Pro), $0.12/1K chars (Turbo); Sonic 2: $0.04-0.15/1K chars

Cartesia

Output TTS character-based pricing (output = audio), per-second for streaming

⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China) Free Tier

10,000 characters/month free tier (≈10 minutes), no credit card required

Pinecone

#30

Pinecone

Input Serverless Standard: $50/月最低,$4-$4.50/M读单元,$16-$18/M写单元,$0.0005/ingestion单元

Output Serverless Enterprise: $500/月最低,$6-$6.75/M读,$24-$27/M写,$0.001/ingestion单元(multi-modal);Pod-based按节点小时计费

⚠️ SaaS-only — no open-source self-host option (proprietary managed service) Free Tier

OVHcloud AI Endpoints

#41

OVHcloud AI Endpoints

Input Billed per 1M tokens. EUR catalog rates: gpt-oss-20b 0.04, gpt-oss-120b 0.08, Qwen3-Coder-30B 0.07, Qwen3.5-9B 0.10, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B 0.10, Mistral-7B 0.11, Qwen3.8-27B / 3.6-27B 0.40, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B 0.60, Llama-3.3-70B 0.67, Qwen2.5-VL-72B 0.91; embeddings bge-m3 0.01 and Qwen3-Embedding-8B 0.10

Output Billed per 1M tokens. EUR catalog rates: Qwen3.5-9B 0.15, gpt-oss-20b 0.15, Qwen3-Coder-30B 0.26, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B 0.31, gpt-oss-120b 0.40, Llama-3.3-70B 0.67, Qwen3.8-27B / 3.6-27B 2.70, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B 3.60; output runs roughly 2.5x to 6x the input rate

⚠️ Proxy required for mainland China. This is a European sovereign endpoint (Gravelines, France) with no mainland-China region; OVHcloud's own Batch comparison table lists availability as WW (out of US). Mainland production traffic needs a proxy or aggregator. Free Tier

Free playground across all catalog models; anonymous tier of 2 req/min with no API key; Batch API free during the two-month Beta; Qwen3Guard, image generation and TTS models listed at 0

FriendliAI

Input From $0.14/M (Gemma-4-31B) to $1.4/M (GLM-5.2/5.1); Whisper $0.0015/audio min

Output From $0.4/M (Gemma-4-31B) to $4.4/M (GLM-5.2/5.1)

⚠️ US + Korea servers, ~200-400ms latency from China Free Tier

No free tier — per-token billing, no minimum

Upstage (Solar)

#30

Upstage (Solar)

Input Solar Pro 4: $0.30/M list (launch promo: 90% off = $0.03/M through 2026-09-10; 70% off = $0.09/M through 2026-10-10); Solar Pro 3 / Pro 2: $0.15/M

Output Solar Pro 4: $1.20/M list (promo $0.12/M then $0.36/M); cached input $0.06/M list ($0.006 then $0.018 in promo); Solar Pro 3 / Pro 2: $0.60/M

⚠️ Proxy or OpenRouter from mainland China; on-premises and dedicated deployment available Free Tier

10 free Studio agent runs (no credit card required)

Suno

#40

Suno

Input Free: $0 (10 songs/day, non-commercial); Pro: $10/mo (500 songs, commercial rights); Premier: $30/mo (2,000 songs, Studio)

Output Annual: Pro $96/yr (20% off), Premier $288/yr (20% off); credit top-ups available as add-ons

⚠️ Limited access from China (stable overseas proxy required), no official China endpoints Free Tier

Free tier: 10 songs per day (non-commercial use only), no credit card required, available immediately on signup

Liquid AI

#40

Liquid AI

Input No per-token cloud API pricing — LFM weights are free to download, run, and fine-tune under the LFM Open License (royalty-free until your company exceeds $10M annual revenue). Inference is self-hosted on your own hardware or deployed on-device via the LEAP SDK; there are no per-request fees.

Output No per-token output billing. Models run locally or self-hosted on CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs — positioned for latency- and privacy-sensitive, high-frequency, or offline workloads (Liquid's framing: "why pay per token for a cloud API instead of running on-device").

⚠️ No managed cloud API, so there is no China direct-connect issue. Model weights download freely and run locally or self-hosted, including inside mainland China (data-sovereignty friendly). No cloud API gateway or proxy needed; token processing happens entirely on local hardware. Free Tier

All 14+ LFM models are free to download, run, and fine-tune under the LFM Open License — including commercially (until your company exceeds $10M annual revenue). Research, education, and non-profit use is always free with no revenue limit.

Xiaomi MiMo

#42

Xiaomi MiMo

Input Per 1M tokens: mimo-v2.6-flash $0.14, mimo-v2.6-pro $0.435, mimo-v2.6-pro-ultraspeed $4.35, mimo-v2.5 $0.40, mimo-v2.5-pro $0.48

Output Per 1M tokens: mimo-v2.6-flash $0.28, mimo-v2.6-pro $0.87, mimo-v2.6-pro-ultraspeed $8.70, mimo-v2.5 $2.00, mimo-v2.5-pro $1.80

⚠️ Chinese company but no mainland-China endpoint on the OpenRouter route; proxy or latency measurement required. Xiaomi own portal at mimo.xiaomi.com may serve China traffic, not verified from our test environment. Free Tier

No free tier; pure pay-as-you-go

Relace

#43

Relace

Input Per 1M tokens (live Relace endpoints on OpenRouter, 2026-11-02): glm-5.2 $0.0065, deepseek-v4.1-flash $0.035, glm-5.3-flash $0.0285, deepseek-v4-flash $0.05, glm-5.3 $0.0703, kimi-k3 $0.1824, deepseek-v4-pro $0.90, relace-apply-3 $0.85, relace-search $1.00

Output Per 1M tokens (live Relace endpoints on OpenRouter, 2026-11-02): glm-5.3-flash $0.0923, deepseek-v4-pro $1.50, relace-apply-3 $1.25, relace-search $3.00, deepseek-v4-flash $0.45, deepseek-v4.1-flash $0.50, glm-5.3 $4.3843, glm-5.2 $7.9057, kimi-k3 $9.3388

⚠️ Overseas service with no mainland-China-optimized endpoint; China latency needs measurement. Code-related API defaults are not designed for mainland-China compliance scenarios. Free Tier

No traditional free token tier; free accounts are rate-limited to 15 requests per minute

Aion Labs

#44

Aion Labs

Input Per 1M tokens (Aion Labs docs and OpenRouter identical, 2026-11-03): aion-3.5-mini $0.70, aion-3.0-mini $0.70, aion-2.0 $0.80, aion-rp-llama-3.1-8b $0.80, aion-3.5 $3.00, aion-3.0 $3.00

Output Per 1M tokens (Aion Labs docs and OpenRouter identical, 2026-11-03): aion-3.5-mini $1.40, aion-3.0-mini $1.40, aion-2.0 $1.60, aion-rp-llama-3.1-8b $1.60, aion-3.5 $6.00, aion-3.0 $6.00

⚠️ Poland-based service with no mainland-China-optimized endpoint; China latency needs measurement. No regional data residency guarantees. Free Tier

Daily credit allowance free tier, no credit card required; rate-limited to 15 requests/min, 20K tokens/min, 20K tokens/day

Scaleway Generative APIs

#45

Scaleway Generative APIs

Input Billed per 1M tokens, EUR list prices before tax: qwen3-embedding-8b and bge-multilingual-gemma2 0.10, mistral-small-3.2 0.15, gpt-oss-120b 0.15, gemma-4-26b-a4b-it and qwen3.6-35b-a3b 0.25, deepseek-v4-flash-0731 0.40, deepseek-v4.1-flash / qwen3.5-397b-a17b / qwen3.8-27b 0.60, qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507 0.75, llama-3.3-70b-instruct 0.90, mistral-medium-3.5-128b 1.50, glm-5.3 and glm-5.2 1.80, lightonocr-3-0.8b 2.20

Output Billed per 1M tokens, EUR list prices before tax: gemma-4-26b-a4b-it 0.50, gpt-oss-120b 0.60, deepseek-v4-flash-0731 0.80, llama-3.3-70b-instruct 0.90, qwen3.6-35b-a3b 1.50, qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507 2.25, qwen3.8-27b 3.30, qwen3.5-397b-a17b 3.60, glm-5.3 and glm-5.2 5.50, mistral-medium-3.5-128b 7.50; embeddings and OCR carry no output charge

⚠️ Proxy required for mainland China. The service runs in a single region (Paris, France) inside the EU, so latency and stability from the Chinese mainland need your own measurement Free Tier

The free tier covers the first 1,000,000 tokens and includes 60 minutes of audio transcription; billing starts at token number 1,000,001

🇨🇳

China-Direct AI APIs

No proxy required in China

Direct access from mainland China — best latency for CN users. Quality and ecosystem vary by provider.

DeepSeek

Input DeepSeek-V3: ¥0.14/M token (≈$0.02), R1: ¥0.14/M

Output DeepSeek-V3: ¥0.28/M token (≈$0.04), R1: ¥0.28/M

Input Qwen3.8-Max: ¥8/M, Qwen3.5-Max: ¥4/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥2/M

Qwen (Alibaba)

Output Qwen3.8-Max: ¥24/M, Qwen3.5-Max: ¥12/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥6/M

✅ Direct China access (Aliyun Bailian); global via OpenRouter and HuggingFace Free Tier

1M tokens free credit for new users (90-day validity); Qwen3.5 open weights for self-hosting

Exa

Input $7 / 1k Search requests (first 10 results; +$1 / 1k extra results; +$1 / 1k AI page summaries)

Output Deep Search: $12-$15 / 1k requests • Agent: $0.012-$1.00 per fixed-effort run • Contents: $1 / 1k pages • Answer: $5 / 1k • Monitors: $15 / 1k

✅ Hosted SaaS globally accessible; direct mainland-China access may be restricted depending on network egress Free Tier

$20 in free credits at signup (~2,800 searches) + $10 in free credits every month; no payment method required; free tier includes access to all API endpoints

Meituan LongCat

Input OpenRouter: $0.60/M token (48B active MoE)

Output OpenRouter: $2.40/M token (48B active MoE)

✅ OpenRouter / Hugging Face self-host Free Tier

Stepfun

Input Step-2: ¥6/M, Step-2-mini: ¥1/M, Step-1: ¥4/M, Step-R: ¥8/M

Output Step-2: ¥18/M, Step-2-mini: ¥3/M, Step-1: ¥12/M, Step-R: ¥24/M

✅ Direct from China (platform.stepfun.com endpoint, domestic BGP routes) Free Tier

New accounts receive 1,000,000 free tokens (30-day validity from registration)

Alibaba Cloud Bailian

Input Qwen3.5-Max: ¥4/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥2/M, Qwen3.5-72B: ¥4/M, QwQ: ¥2/M

Output Qwen3.5-Max: ¥12/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥6/M, Qwen3.5-72B: ¥12/M, QwQ: ¥8/M

Input ERNIE 4.5 Turbo: $0.003/M tokens, ERNIE 4.0 Turbo: $0.012/M

Baidu ERNIE (文心一言)

Output ERNIE 4.5 Turbo: $0.003/M, ERNIE 4.0 Turbo: $0.012/M

Input K3.1 Pro: $2/M uncached ($0.20 cached); Highspeed $4/M; K3: $3/M ($0.30); K2.7/K2.6: $0.95/M

Moonshot AI Kimi

Output K3.1 Pro: $10/M; Highspeed $20/M; K3: $15/M; K2.7/K2.6: $4/M

✅ Direct access intended for Mainland China Free Tier

New-user credit cannot be spent on the K3 series; K3 models unlock after a minimum $1 top-up, with rate-limit tiers set by cumulative recharge

Dify

Input Sandbox free: 200 GPT-4 calls + 5MB vector storage + 10 docs + 5,000 API calls/month; Professional $59/workplace/mo: 100MB vector + 100 docs + 50 workflows

Output Team $159/workplace/mo: 500MB vector + 500 docs + 200 workflows + 500K trigger events; Enterprise custom (SSO/private deploy/SLA)

✅ Parent company LangGenius is China-based; native Chinese support, Alibaba Cloud one-click deploy, SOC 2/GDPR/ISO 27001 certified, full China availability Free Tier

Sandbox free tier: 200 GPT-4 calls + 5MB vector storage + 10 docs + 2 workflows + 5,000 API calls/month (30-day logs)

Zhipu AI GLM

Input GLM-5.3 (Workers AI): $1.40/M + $0.26/M cached; GLM-5.2: ¥8/M; GLM-5.3-Flash (Workers AI): $0.15/M; GLM-5: ¥4-6/M; GLM-4.7: ¥2-4/M; GLM-4.5-Air: ¥0.8/M; GLM-4.7-Flash: ¥0/M (free)

Zhipu AI GLM

Output GLM-5.3 (Workers AI): $4.40/M; GLM-5.2: ¥28/M; GLM-5.3-Flash (Workers AI): $0.50/M; GLM-5: ¥18-22/M; GLM-4.7: ¥8-16/M; GLM-4.5-Air: ¥2-8/M; GLM-4.7-Flash: ¥0/M (free)

Cloudflare AI Gateway

Input 免费层: 100万次请求/月；超出 $0.20/100万次 + Provider 自身费用

Cloudflare AI Gateway

Output 按请求计费，不按 token 计；Gateway 本身加价 $0.20/100万请求

✅ Global CDN (China edge via partners) Free Tier

Tencent Hunyuan

Input Turbo S: ¥0.8/M tokens, Turbo: ¥1.2/M, Lite: ¥0.3/M

Tencent Hunyuan

Output Turbo S: ¥0.8/M tokens, Turbo: ¥4.8/M, Lite: ¥0.3/M

ByteDance Doubao

Input Seed-2.0: ¥0.8/M, Seed-2.0-lite: ¥0.5/M, Seed-2.0-mini: ¥0.15/M

ByteDance Doubao

Output Seed-2.0: ¥2/M, Seed-2.0-lite: ¥1/M, Seed-2.0-mini: ¥0.6/M

LiteLLM

Input 开源免费自部署；LiteLLM Cloud 按量计费

LiteLLM

Output 开源免费自部署；LiteLLM Cloud 按量计费

✅ Open-source self-hosted, no restrictions Free Tier

SiliconFlow

Input ¥0.4-2/1M tokens (Qwen2.5-7B ~¥0.4, Llama 3.3 70B ~¥2)

SiliconFlow

Output ¥0.4-2/1M tokens

¥1-200 free credits on signup (varies by promo), enough for 1-20M tokens

Arize Phoenix

Input Cloud free tier: 10 GiB storage per workspace; Self-host: $0 (infrastructure only)

Arize Phoenix

Output Phoenix Cloud paid: pay-as-you-go (storage-based pricing); Arize AX enterprise: custom contract

✅ Open-source self-host + Phoenix Cloud (China SaaS access requires proxy) Free Tier

Phoenix Cloud free tier: 10 GiB storage per workspace (no time limit)

Block AI (b.ai)

Input 主流模型 + 0-10% 加价（如 GPT-4o $2.5→$2.75/M）

Block AI (b.ai)

Output 主流模型 + 0-10% 加价

Helicone

Input 免费层: 10,000 请求/月 + 1GB 存储；Pro $79/月(团队版含告警、HQL 查询)；Team $799/月(SOC-2/HIPAA)

Helicone

Output 按月订阅 + 用量计费(超过免费额度)

✅ Open-source self-host + SaaS Free Tier

FreeModel

Input Model-dependent (platform markup TBD)

FreeModel

Output Model-dependent

✅ Available in China Free Tier

Credits on registration (amount TBD)

APIKEY.FUN

Input 主流模型，价格约为官方 API 的 60-80%

APIKEY.FUN

Output 主流模型，价格约为官方 API 的 60-80%

01.AI Yi (零一万物)

Input ¥0.99/1M total tokens (Yi-Lightning, input+output combined billing)

01.AI Yi (零一万物)

Output ¥0.99/1M total tokens (combined billing, no input/output distinction)

✅ Direct access in China (Chinese company, supports domestic registration + Alipay/WeChat Pay) Free Tier

Free rate limit tier on registration (limited RPM/TPM), no free initial credits

MiniMax (Hailuo AI)

Input MiniMax-01 Lightning: ¥0.2/M tokens, Turbo: ¥0.8/M, Pro: ¥2/M, M3: ¥1.5/M

MiniMax (Hailuo AI)

Output MiniMax-01 Lightning: ¥0.2/M tokens, Turbo: ¥0.8/M, Pro: ¥2/M, M3: ¥1.5/M

Mem0

Input Hobby free: 10,000 memories + 1,000 retrieval API calls/month; Starter $19/mo: 50,000 memories + 5,000 calls

Mem0

Output Pro $249/mo: unlimited memories + 50,000 retrieval API calls + Graph Memory + multi-project; Enterprise contract

✅ Open-source (Apache-2.0, 61k+ stars) + Cloud SaaS; self-host works in China without proxy Free Tier

Hobby free tier: 10,000 memories + 1,000 retrieval API calls/month (unlimited end users), community support

Kling AI (Kuaishou)

Input Per-second video billing. Kling 3.0 Turbo: 720p $0.112/s, 1080p $0.14/s. Kling 3.0: 720p $0.084-0.126/s, 1080p $0.112-0.168/s (Native Audio), 4K $0.42/s. Kling 3.0 Omni: 720p $0.084-0.126/s, 1080p $0.112-0.168/s, 4K $0.42/s, varies by video/audio input.

Kling AI (Kuaishou)

Output Image API: Kling Image 3.0 $0.028/image (1K/2K), 3.0-omni $0.028-0.056/image (up to 4K), Image 2.1 $0.014-0.028/image, Image O1 $0.028/image, Multi-Shot $0.07/call. Video list price 1 Unit = $0.14; image list price 1 Unit = $0.0035.

✅ Official Chinese service available (Kuaishou first-party, mainland cloud nodes available via Kling Open Platform); the global klingai.com developer API can require network setup depending on region Free Tier

New users get a small one-time free credit grant on the platform to try video/image generation; there is no permanent free API tier — API usage is billed per generated second (video) or per image.

Chroma

Input Chroma OSS is fully free (Apache 2.0) for local/embedded; Chroma Cloud Free forever: 50K vectors, 5K queries/mo, 0.5 GB storage; Pro $0.30/M vectors-mo + $0.01/M queries (min $10/mo); Enterprise contract (custom nodes, HIPAA, SOC 2)

Chroma

Output Three-dimension billing (storage GB-mo + vector count + query count); no per-embedding API fee; default embedding function runs locally at zero cost; BYO embedding billed by third-party API

✅ Chroma OSS runs fully local (on any server, zero latency); Chroma Cloud on AWS us-east-1 / eu-west-1 / ap-southeast-2 (Singapore node planned H2 2026), ~200-400ms latency from mainland China Free Tier

Chroma OSS permanently free, Apache 2.0, no feature limits, no vector count cap (limited by local hardware); Chroma Cloud Free forever: 50K vectors + 5K queries/mo + 0.5 GB storage + 1 Collection + community support

fal.ai

#27

fal.ai

Input Per-request / per-second billing, no subscription. Image gen: FLUX.2 Pro $0.03/first MP + $0.015/extra MP, FLUX1.1 [pro] per MP, Nano Banana 2 $0.08/image, FLUX.1 [schnell] no price displayed. Video: Kling v3 $0.084-0.168/sec, Seedance 2.0 $0.3034/sec (720p). TTS: routed through ElevenLabs/MiniMax at provider rates. Credit-based: prepay $10+ into credit balance, usage deducted at model-specific rates. Open-source models billed per-second with sub-second granularity.

Output

✅ Available from Mainland China (fal.ai uses global CDN, no proxy needed); latency varies by model inference node, typically 200-500ms Free Tier

No free API tier (prepay $10+ for credit balance); no monthly fees, no subscriptions, no hidden fees; serverless auto-scales to zero when idle

Hume AI

Input EVI 3: ~$0.096/min (pay-per-second); OCTAVE TTS: $0.048/1K chars; Expression Measurement: $0.0008/sec

Hume AI

Output Same as input (most endpoints symmetric)

Proxy required (US export controls) Free Tier

Free credits on signup (amount per account), enough to trial EVI 3

🔗

AI API Gateways & Aggregators

One API key → 400+ models. Unified access with auto-routing and model flexibility.

OpenRouter

300+ models

⚠️ Partial (not blocked in China but unstable) Free

Gateway to 400+ models from 70+ providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API endpoint

Bifrost (by Maxim)

1000+ models

⚠️ Self-hosted software, no managed endpoint; deployable to any cloud (incl. Alibaba/HuaweiCloud) with self-hosted upstream (Ollama/vLLM) for data-residency Free

Open-source Apache-2.0 AI gateway in Go — 7,869 ⭐ and 1,176 forks on GitHub (as of 2026-09-08)

Apache-2.0 OSS tier is free forever (Docker / K8s / Go binary / npx); 14-day Enterprise free trial

Hugging Face

200000+ models

⚠️ huggingface.co blocked in mainland China; workarounds include hf-mirror.com mirror or self-hosted Inference Endpoints on a domestic cloud (Alibaba / Tencent) Free

World's largest AI model + dataset community: 200,000+ models, 1,000,000+ datasets, 500,000+ Spaces (as of 2026-09-09)

$0.10 monthly inference credits for free users; 200,000+ models readable; Spaces + Datasets free hosting; Inference API rate-limited

Vercel AI Gateway

200+ models

⚠️ Proxy required (China needs VPN) Free

$5/mo free credit, zero markup on tokens (incl. BYOK)

$5/month free AI Gateway Credits per team (Free-Tier eligible models only)

Dify

100+ models

✅ Parent company LangGenius is China-based; native Chinese support, Alibaba Cloud one-click deploy, SOC 2/GDPR/ISO 27001 certified, full China availability Free

GitHub 150,010 stars — the de-facto open-source LLM app platform (langgenius/dify, Apache-style license)

Sandbox free tier: 200 GPT-4 calls + 5MB vector storage + 10 docs + 2 workflows + 5,000 API calls/month (30-day logs)

Cloudflare AI Gateway

500+ models

✅ Global CDN (China edge via partners) Free

Unified API gateway for 20+ AI providers

Portkey

200+ models

❌ Proxy required (portkey.ai is unstable from mainland China; self-hosted open-source edition recommended for CN teams) Free

🎯 AI Gateway + full-stack observability in one console: Gateway, Logs, Feedback, Guardrails

10,000 requests/month; 100K log retention; community Slack support; BYOK free; no credit card required

Eden AI

1009+ models

⚠️ HQ in France; EU endpoint (api.eu.edenai.run) keeps data in Europe for GDPR/AI Act. Mainland China access typically requires overseas egress (200-400ms avg latency). Free

1,009 models aggregated across 33 providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen, Z.ai, xAI, Meta, etc.)

No subscription — buy prepaid credits via Stripe at any size; Self-serve plan default 10 req/sec (upgradable to 15 req/sec on request)

LiteLLM

100+ models

✅ Open-source self-hosted, no restrictions Free

100+ provider unified interface, popular open-source

SiliconFlow

100+ models

✅ Direct access in China Free

All-in-one model hosting in China, 100+ open-source models online

¥1-200 free credits on signup (varies by promo), enough for 1-20M tokens

Arize Phoenix

100+ models

✅ Open-source self-host + Phoenix Cloud (China SaaS access requires proxy) Free

Only Elastic-2.0 open-source (10,600+ stars) OpenTelemetry-native LLM observability platform

Phoenix Cloud free tier: 10 GiB storage per workspace (no time limit)

Block AI (b.ai)

150+ models

✅ Direct access in China Free

One key for GPT-4o / Claude / Gemini overseas models

fal.ai

200+ models

❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East deployment) Free

200+ models under one API: FLUX, Kling, Hunyuan, MiniMax, Wan all routed through fal

Helicone

100+ models

✅ Open-source self-host + SaaS Free

YC W23, Apache-2.0 open-source LLM observability platform

FreeModel

50+ models

✅ Available in China Free

Official DeepSeek partner — direct access to DeepSeek V3, R1 models

Credits on registration (amount TBD)

AI/ML API (AIMLAPI)

785+ models

One OpenAI-compatible key covers 785+ unique models / 1000+ marketed: Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Grok, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Qwen, GLM, Kimi + image/video/TTS/STT/embedding/OCR/batch

APIKEY.FUN

50+ models

✅ Direct access in China Free

Direct China access to overseas models

Replicate

50000+ models

50,000+ open-source models across all AI domains

❌ Proxy required Free

Novita AI

50+ models

⚠️ Partial (Singapore node, acceptable latency from China) Free

Competitive Llama 3.3 70B pricing

Baseten

35+ models

⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China) Free

Per-second GPU billing, the most transparent pay-as-you-go among Replicate-style competitors

$30 in inference credits on signup (valid 30 days); custom model hosting free tier: 1 deployed model

Mem0

50+ models

✅ Open-source (Apache-2.0, 61k+ stars) + Cloud SaaS; self-host works in China without proxy Free

De-facto AI Agent memory layer (61,493 GitHub stars, Apache-2.0, mem0ai/mem0)

Hobby free tier: 10,000 memories + 1,000 retrieval API calls/month (unlimited end users), community support

Tavily

7+ models

🎯 Default search API for AI agents: LangChain TavilySearchResults, LlamaIndex TavilyToolSpec, AutoGen/CrewAI/smolagents all default to Tavily

Pika API

120+ models

❌ Proxy required (Pika Labs US service, no mainland China direct access) Free

API Club aggregates 100+ frontier Gen-Media models: Seedance / Kling 3.0 / Veo 3.1 / MiniMax H3 / GPT Image 2 / Claude Fable 5 under one API

No free API tier on the consumer plan. API Club gives a $10 first-month usage credit, but requires the $10/mo membership to unlock wholesale member pricing

fal.ai

#27

1396+ models

✅ Available from Mainland China (fal.ai uses global CDN, no proxy needed); latency varies by model inference node, typically 200-500ms Free

🧠 1,396+ open-source/commercial models: FLUX.2 Pro, GPT Image 2, Kling Video, Nano Banana 2, ElevenLabs TTS, MiniMax and more

No free API tier (prepay $10+ for credit balance); no monthly fees, no subscriptions, no hidden fees; serverless auto-scales to zero when idle

🛡️ News Analysis

GPT-5.6 Sol Sandbox Design: 5 Patterns for Agent API Safety

GPT-5.6 Sol deletes files and databases on its own. Five sandbox patterns that keep your API integration safe when the model goes off-script.

2026-07-19 OpenRouter Review: Is the aggregators worth it? →

💰 Token Price Comparison

Sorted: global APIs first, then global-with-partial-China, then China-direct.

Provider	Popular Models	Input	Output	China Access	Free Tier
OpenAI	GPT-6 Astra (frontier, $10/$50 Standard, $1/$12.50 cache, 1.05M context, ExploitBench 100%, Critical cybersecurity), GPT-6.1 Terra (fast, $1/$5 Standard, $0.50/$2.50 Batch, 1.05M context, computer use)	GPT-6 Astra: $10/M input + $50/M output (1.05M context, cache $1/$12.50, Fast 2x, Batch 50%); GPT-6.1 Sol: $2/M input + $10/M output Standard (1.05M context); GPT-6.1 Terra: $1/M input + $5/M output Standard, $0.50/$2.50 Batch (1.05M context, >272K input = 2x input / 1.5x output); GPT-5.6 Sol: $4/$20 Standard, $2/$10 Batch (promo through Nov 21, 2026); GPT-5: $1.25/$10, GPT-5 mini: $0.25/$2, GPT-4o: $2.50/$10, GPT-4o mini: $0.15/$0.60	Batch/Flex API for all models: 50% discount; long-context (>272K input): 2x Standard tier; Fast mode: 2x applicable rates; cache writes 1.25x input	❌ Proxy required (export control restrictions for China users)	New accounts receive $5 in credits valid for 3 months	View Details →
Anthropic Claude	Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Mythos 5.1	Fable 5.1/Mythos 5.1: $10/M (cache read $0.25/M), Opus 5.5: $4/M (cache read $0.20/M), Opus 5/4.8: $5/M, Sonnet 5.5: $2/M, Haiku 5.5: from $0.10/M, Sonnet 5/4.5: $3/M, Haiku 4.5: $0.80/M	Fable 5.1/Mythos 5.1: $50/M, Opus 5.5: $20/M, Opus 5/4.8: $25/M, Sonnet 5.5: $10/M, Haiku 5.5: from $0.50/M, Sonnet 5/4.5: $15/M, Haiku 4.5: $4/M	❌ Proxy required (US export controls)	Limited Claude.ai free tier (web only); no API credits; Sonnet 5 limited-time pricing at $2/M until Aug 31, 2026	View Details →
xAI Grok	Grok 4.6, Grok 4.6 Fast	Grok 4.6: $2/M tokens (fast variant $4/M)	Grok 4.6: $6/M tokens (fast variant $12/M)	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Cerebras Inference	Gemma 4 31B (multimodal), Z.ai GLM 4.7	Gemma 4 31B $0.99/M, Z.ai GLM 4.7 $2.25/M, OpenAI GPT-OSS 120B $0.35/M, Llama 3.3 70B $0.60/M	Gemma 4 31B $1.49/M, Z.ai GLM 4.7 $2.75/M, OpenAI GPT-OSS 120B $0.75/M, Llama 3.3 70B $0.60/M	❌ Proxy required (US-origin only)	$5 trial credits on signup with access to every Cerebras-powered model; lower rate limits	View Details →
Gemini Multimodal	Gemini Omni Flash (multimodal, 1M context, audio+video+text), Nano Banana 2 Lite (image generation, $0.034/1K tokens)	Omni Flash: $0.15/M input tokens (multimodal); Nano Banana 2 Lite: $0.034/1K image tokens; Veo 3.1: $0.10/sec video	Omni Flash: $0.60/M output tokens (multimodal); Nano Banana Pro: $0.12/1K image tokens	❌ Proxy required (Google AI Studio not directly accessible from mainland China; requires stable proxy)	Free tier: Gemini Omni Flash 15 RPM, Veo 3.1 2 generations/day, Imagen 4 10 images/day — no credit card required	View Details →
Google Gemini	Gemini 4 Carbon (frontier, $2/$10 intro, $4/$20 after, not yet public), Gemini 4 Argon (frontier, $2/$10 intro, 1M context, 1M output tokens)	Gemini 4 Carbon/Argon: $2/M intro, $4/M after; 2.5 Pro: $1.25-10/M, 2.5 Flash: $0.15-1.25/M, 2.0 Flash: $0.10/M	Gemini 4 Carbon/Argon: $10/M intro, $20/M after; 2.5 Pro: $5-40/M, 2.5 Flash: $0.30-5/M, 2.0 Flash: $0.40/M	❌ Proxy required (Google Cloud not accessible in CN)	Gemini 4 Carbon not yet public (Fairwind Program cohort only); Gemini 4 Argon paid-tier only; 2.5 Pro/Flash have free rate limits (15-30 RPM)	View Details →
Cloudflare Workers AI	@cf/zai-org/glm-5.3 — Z.ai 320B MoE coding model (1M ctx, $1.40/$4.40), @cf/zai-org/glm-5.3-flash — fast variant ($0.15/$0.50)	Neurons-based: $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons (after free tier); per-model token prices vary	Same Neurons billing; token price differs per model — Llama 3.3 70B $0.293/$2.253, GLM-5.3 $1.40/$4.40, DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.32/$3.96, GPT-OSS 120B $0.35/$0.75 per M tokens	❌ Mainland China edge unreachable (CF has no in-China GPU POPs); proxy required; ideal for overseas / HK-MO-TW / outbound-China workloads	10,000 Neurons per day free on Workers Free plan	View Details →
Perplexity AI	Sonar Pro, Sonar	Sonar Pro: $3/M, Sonar: $1/M	Sonar Pro: $15/M, Sonar: $1/M	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Meta Model API	Muse Spark 1.1 (muse-spark-1.1)	$1.25/1M tokens	$4.25/1M tokens	❌ Proxy required (Meta Model API public preview for US developers only; China access requires proxy)	Free tier: 60 RPM, 2M TPM; free credits on signup for US developers (public preview)	View Details →
Exa	Search — neural semantic search across the web; 6 search types (auto / instant / fast / deep-lite / deep / deep-reasoning); returns 10 results by default, $1/1k per extra result above 10; AI page summaries $1/1k pages, Contents — full page text / highlights / summaries for known URLs; $1/1k pages per content type (text, highlights, summary billed separately)	Pure pay-as-you-go, billed per endpoint and search-type. Search $7/1k requests (base 10 results) + $1/1k per extra result above 10 + $1/1k AI summaries; Contents $1/1k pages; Answer $5/1k; Monitors $15/1k; Deep Search $12-15/1k; Agent fixed effort $0.012-$1.00 per request or usage-based $0.10/ACU + tool calls (default $5 auto cap, $20 max cap). New accounts get $20 in free credits (~2,800 searches); Free Tier adds $10/month.	Same as input. Enterprise custom volume + Zero Data Retention + SLA + postpaid invoice billing.	❌ Proxy required for mainland China. Exa runs the primary API at https://api.exa.ai from a single-region US deployment. There is no documented ICP-registered mainland China endpoint as of 2026-08-30. Mainland China production traffic typically needs a proxy or relay; transpacific first-byte latency is usually 100-300 ms. Enterprise plans can negotiate custom routing and dedicated infrastructure for regulated workloads (HIPAA / GDPR data residency).	Permanent $20 signup credit (~2,800 Search calls) + automatic $10 Free Tier monthly credit refill. No credit card required, no minimum spend. Free credits apply to every endpoint.	View Details →
Mistral AI	Mistral Large 4, Mistral Small 4	Large 4: $0.70/M ($0.07 cached), Small 4: $0.15/M, Codestral: $0.30/M	Large 4: $2.10/M, Small 4: $0.60/M, Codestral: $0.90/M	❌ Proxy required	Free API credits on signup on La Plateforme (within daily rate limits)	View Details →
Cohere	Command R+, Command R7	Command R7: $2.50/M, Command R: $0.50/M, Embed: $0.10/M	Command R7: $10/M, Command R: $1.50/M	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Fireworks AI	Llama 3.3 70B, Firefunction-v2	Firefunction-v2: $0.90/M, Llama 3.3 70B: $0.90/M, DeepSeek-R1: $2.00/M	Firefunction-v2: $0.90/M, Llama 3.3 70B: $0.90/M, DeepSeek-R1: $2.00/M	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Portkey	OpenAI GPT-4o / GPT-5 / GPT-5.6 family, Anthropic Claude Opus 5 / Sonnet 5 / Haiku	Free tier: 10,000 requests/month; Hobby $49/month (100K requests); Growth $249/month (1M requests); Enterprise contract	Per-request billing, no token routing markup; BYOK free; logs/observability/caching gated by subscription tier	❌ Proxy required (portkey.ai is unstable from mainland China; self-hosted open-source edition recommended for CN teams)	10,000 requests/month; 100K log retention; community Slack support; BYOK free; no credit card required	View Details →
Black Forest Labs	FLUX.2 [pro], FLUX.1.1 [pro]	FLUX.2 [pro]: $0.05/MP, FLUX.1.1 [pro]: $0.04/MP, FLUX.1 [schnell]: $0.003/MP, FLUX.1 Fill: $0.05/MP	Flat per-megapixel billing, no tier-based markup	❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East + EU-Frankfurt deployment)		View Details →
Jina AI	jina-embeddings-v3, jina-embeddings-v2-base-en	Embeddings v3: $0.02/M tokens (10K free); Reranker v3: $0.018/M tokens (10K free); Reader: $0.02/M tokens (free up to 1M tokens); CLIP-v1: $0.02/M tokens	Flat per-million-token billing, no tier-based markup; batch discount of 50% available on all endpoints	❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East + EU-Frankfurt deployment)		View Details →
Groq	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.59/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.89/M, Mixtral 8x7B: $0.15/M	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.79/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.89/M, Mixtral 8x7B: $0.15/M	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
fal.ai	FLUX.2 [pro] / [dev] / [schnell], Kling Video 2.1 / 2.0	FLUX.2 [pro]: $0.05/MP (image), $0.08/sec (video); Kling 2.1: $0.10/sec; HunyuanVideo 1.5: $0.08/sec	Flat per-second / per-megapixel billing, no tier-based markup	❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East deployment)		View Details →
Cerebras	Cerebras Llama 3.3 70B, Cerebras Llama 3.1 405B	$0.10/M to $0.60/M tokens（所有模型统一 $0.60/M input）	$0.10/M to $0.60/M tokens（统一 $0.60/M output）	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
AI21 Labs (Jamba)	Jamba 1.5 Mini, Jamba 1.5 Large	Jamba 1.5 Mini: $0.20/M tokens, Jamba 1.5 Large: $2/M tokens	Jamba 1.5 Mini: $0.20/M tokens, Jamba 1.5 Large: $2/M tokens	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
CoreWeave	NVIDIA HGX H100 ($49.24/hr), HGX H200 ($50.44/hr), HGX B200 ($68.80/hr), A100 80GB ($21.60/hr), L40S ($18.00/hr), L40 ($10.00/hr), GB200 NVL72 ($42.00/hr) — On-Demand/Spot GPU instances, Serverless Inference (W&B Inference, pay-per-token): GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6/K2.7, DeepSeek R1/V3, Llama 3.x, Qwen — OpenAI-compatible API	GPU On-Demand hourly: NVIDIA HGX H100 $49.24, HGX H200 $50.44, HGX B200 $68.80, A100 80GB $21.60, L40S $18.00, L40 $10.00, GB200 NVL72 $42.00. Spot discounts: H100 $19.71, H200 $20.93, B200 $34.11, A100 $9.65. Serverless Inference bills per token via W&B Inference; Dedicated Inference bills on GPU-hour or node basis.		❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Data centers concentrated in the US; expanded to Indonesia (first APAC region), UK (two operational data centers), and Sweden in 2026. China access requires proxy; cross-Pacific latency is high.	No permanent free tier. Serverless Inference bills per token; GPU instances bill hourly (On-Demand) with spot discounts. The 0EM (Zero Egress Migration) program waives egress fees during migration into CoreWeave.	View Details →
AI/ML API (AIMLAPI)	1,000+ models via one OpenAI-compatible key (785 unique live catalog on /v1/models, 937 rows, verified 2026-09-07), anthropic/claude-sonnet-5 ($2.60/$13.00 per 1M, 1M ctx, below Anthropic first-party)	Per-1M-token list rates, many below first-party via aggregator volume discounts (verified aimlapi.com model pages 2026-09-07): Claude Sonnet 5 $2.60, GPT-5.2 $2.275, DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.5655, Gemini 3.6 Flash $1.95, Claude Fable 5 $13	Claude Sonnet 5 $13.00; GPT-5.2 $18.20; DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.131; Gemini 3.6 Flash $9.75; Claude Fable 5 $65	❌ No mainland-China endpoint/residency. api.aimlapi.com/v1 is a single global OpenAI-compatible endpoint fronted by Cloudflare; legal entities AIMLAPI OÜ (Estonia) + Boiler Labs FZ-LLC (Dubai) make the EU/GDPR angle strong, but mainland-China production traffic routes via proxy/relay.	No permanent free tier — official FAQ: 'The Free Tier is currently paused.' Signup trial credits let you prototype (Developer $0 plan still advertises them) but there is no ongoing free allowance; then credit-based pay-as-you-go.	View Details →
DeepInfra	Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.49/M, DeepSeek-V3: $0.99/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1.09/M	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.73/M, DeepSeek-V3: $0.99/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1.09/M	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
NVIDIA NIM	Nemotron-3 Ultra 550B (a55B), Nemotron-3 Super 120B (a12B)	Partner-dependent (Nemotron-3 Ultra 550B: $0.50-0.90/1M tokens)	Partner-dependent (Nemotron-3 Ultra 550B: $1.70-3.60/1M tokens)	❌ Proxy required (US-based platform, export control restrictions apply)	Free serverless API endpoints for prototyping (no credit card required, generate API key to start)	View Details →
Amazon Bedrock	Claude Opus 4.8 / 4.7 / 4.6 / 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6 / 4.5 / 4	Claude Sonnet 4.5: $6/M, DeepSeek V3.2: $0.62/M, Mistral Large 3: $0.50/M, GPT-5.5: $5.50/M, GPT-5.4: $2.75/M, Grok 4.3: $1.25/M, Qwen3 235B: $0.23/M, Kimi K2.5: $0.60/M	Claude Sonnet 4.5: $30/M, DeepSeek V3.2: $1.85/M, Mistral Large 3: $1.50/M, GPT-5.5: $33/M, GPT-5.4: $16.50/M, Grok 4.3: $2.50/M, Qwen3 235B: $0.91/M, Kimi K2.5: $3/M	❌ Proxy/VPN required for mainland China users (Bedrock not available in AWS China regions)	AWS Free Tier offers up to $200 credits for new customers (valid 6 months). No permanent free tier for Bedrock.	View Details →
Hyperbolic	DeepSeek R1, DeepSeek R1-0528	Per-token inference scaled from market GPU rates; H100 from $2.89/GPU-hour, H200 $3.49/GPU-hour	Pay-as-you-go GPU compute billed per hour; reserved discounts for committed capacity	❌ Proxy required	No permanent free tier and no long-term lock-in. On-demand GPUs are pay-as-you-go billed per hour, with no quota limits and no minimum commitment to start.	View Details →
Fireworks AI	DeepSeek V4 Pro — $1.74 input / $0.145 cached / $3.48 output per 1M tokens (Serverless Standard; Priority $2.61 / $0.218 / $5.22), DeepSeek V4 Flash (0731) — $0.22 input / $0.007 cached / $0.66 output per 1M (Standard)	Serverless (Standard, $/1M tokens): DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.74, V4 Flash $0.22, Kimi K3 $3.00, K2.7 Code $0.95, MiniMax M3 $0.30, Qwen 3.7 Plus $0.40, GPT OSS 120B $0.15, GLM 5.1 $1.40. Embeddings $0.008-$0.016/1M by tier. On-demand GPUs per hour: H100 $7.00, H200 $7.00, B200 $10.00, B300 $12.00, GB300 $18.00 (rising Sep 1).	Serverless output ($/1M): DeepSeek V4 Pro $3.48, V4 Flash $0.66, Kimi K3 $15.00, MiniMax M3 $1.20, Qwen 3.7 Plus $1.60, GPT OSS 120B $0.60, GLM 5.1 $4.40. Cached input far lower (DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.145). Training: SFT $0.50/1M train tokens (≤16B) to $10.00 (>300B); Serverless Training API bills tokens only, no idle GPU cost.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. As a US-based platform, direct access from the mainland requires proxy or relay; cross-Pacific first-byte latency typically 150-250ms. Closest APAC endpoint is the Tokyo multi-region.	$1 in free serverless credits on signup (pay-per-token, postpaid billing); no permanent free tier. On-demand GPUs and training bill by usage.	View Details →
Replicate	Llama 3.3 70B, DeepSeek-R1	模型调用按运行时长 + GPU 型号计费，$0.00025/s/A100起步	按运行时长计费（非 token 计费模式）	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
SambaNova	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M, Qwen 72B: $0.40/M	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M, Qwen 72B: $0.40/M	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Nebius	DeepSeek V4 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Pro	Per-token OpenAI-compatible inference: DeepSeek-V4-Flash $0.14/M input, $0.28/M output; Kimi K3 $3/$15; MiniMax M3 $0.30/$1.20; Llama 3.3 70B $0.13/$0.40	Two flavors per model - Base and Fast (-fast suffix) - same outputs, Fast trades higher token price for lower latency via speculative decoding	❌ Proxy required	No setup fee and no monthly subscription. Token Factory is pay-as-you-go per token, with elastic dynamic rate limits that auto-scale up to 20x your base allocation as sustained usage grows - no capacity reservation needed to start.	View Details →
Inception AI Mercury	Mercury 2.5 (Preview) (240B-class diffusion LLM, 260K ctx, $0.20/$0.75, reasoning+tool use; OpenRouter promo $0.04/$0.15), Mercury 2 (frontier reasoning diffusion LLM, 128K ctx, $0.25/$0.75, ~1000 tok/s, tool calling, structured outputs)	Mercury 2.5 (Preview): $0.20/M (cached $0.02/M, output $0.75/M); Mercury 2 / Mercury Edit 2: $0.25/M input (cached $0.025/M) + $0.75/M output	All Mercury models: $0.75/M output at list; Mercury 2.5 Preview is currently discounted on OpenRouter at ~$0.04/M in / $0.15/M out (launch promo, context 260K)	❌ Proxy required (US-origin API, Redwood City CA)	100M free tokens for every new account (no payment details required)	View Details →
Anyscale	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.39/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1/M, Mixtral 8x22B: $0.90/M	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.39/M, DeepSeek-R1: $1/M, Mixtral 8x22B: $0.90/M	❌ Proxy required	New users get $100 in one-time free credits; small project starter credits ($3-$5) are also available.	View Details →
DigitalOcean Gradient	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.50/M, DeepSeek-R1: $0.80/M	❌ Proxy required	New accounts get $200 in credits valid for 60 days. There is no permanent free tier; after the credit window, serverless inference bills per token (starting around $0.20 per 1M for the smallest hosted model) and GPU Droplets bill by the hour.	View Details →
Sakana AI	Fugu (default, balanced performance and latency, pay-as-you-go), Fugu Max (cost-efficient Pareto, $2/$6 per 1M tokens)	Fugu Max: $2/M (fixed any context); Fugu Ultra v2: $5/M standard (≤272K) or $10/M long context (>272K)	Fugu Max: $6/M (fixed); Fugu Ultra v2: $30/M standard or $45/M long context	❌ Proxy required (Japan-origin API)	Self-serve signup at console.sakana.ai; pay-as-you-go Token Plan; no upfront payment required	View Details →
Stability AI	Stable Diffusion 3.5, Stable Diffusion XL	SD3.5: $0.0065/image, SDXL: $0.01/image, Stable Code: $0.50/M tokens	按图像/视频/音频输出计费，非 token 计费	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Pika API	Seedance 2.0 / 2.5 (video, up to 4K), Kling 3.0 / 3.0 Turbo / Motion Control (video, 4K)	$10/mo membership + $10 first-month credit. Pay-as-you-go wholesale per-model rates: GPT Image 2.0 $22.50/1M tokens; Seedance 2.0 R2V 480P $0.0903/sec; MiniMax H3 T2V 2K $0.13/sec	GPT Image 2.0 images $22.50/1M tokens; Seedream 5.0 Pro 2K $0.09/image; Nano Banana Pro $0.134/image; audio billed per minute / request / 1k chars; video per second	❌ Proxy required (Pika Labs US service, no mainland China direct access)	No free API tier on the consumer plan. API Club gives a $10 first-month usage credit, but requires the $10/mo membership to unlock wholesale member pricing	View Details →
Ideogram	Ideogram 3.0, Ideogram Turbo	Ideogram 3.0: $0.04/image (standard), $0.08/image (Turbo)	4 images per generation (default), additional images via paid credits	❌ Proxy required		View Details →
Lambda	NVIDIA HGX B200 180GB (on-demand GPU instances; $6.69/GPU/hr), NVIDIA H100 SXM 80GB ($3.99/GPU/hr on-demand)	GPU instance on-demand per GPU/hr: NVIDIA B200 SXM6 $6.69, H100 SXM $3.99, A100 SXM 80GB $2.79, A100 SXM 40GB $1.99, GH200 $2.29, A100 PCIe $1.99, A6000 $1.09, A10 $1.29, V100 $0.79. 1-Click Cluster reserved per GPU/hr: B200 $9.86 (16 GPU) down to $8.87 (256+), H100 $6.16 down to $5.54. Superclusters / Private Cloud (4000+ GPUs) via sales. No egress fees.	Billed by the second per GPU instance (no idle GPU cost); clusters and reserved capacity carry a minimum commitment (2 weeks to 1 year). Managed orchestration: Managed Kubernetes and Slurm included at no extra per-node fee; Lambda Stack one-line install. No per-token inference pricing — Lambda's Inference API is winding down; self-hosted inference billed as GPU runtime.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint; data centers in the US (California and other regions), China access requires proxy or overseas relay.	No permanent free GPU tier; usage-based billing after signup (GPU instances billed per second). 1-Click Clusters and Superclusters require prepaid / committed terms (2 weeks to 1 year).	View Details →
Luma AI	Ray 3.2 (flagship video, 1080p, multi-keyframe up to 16 frames, V2V up to 20s), Ray 3.14 (previous-gen video model)	Credit-based subscription. Plans: Plus $30/mo (10,000 credits), Pro $90/mo (40,000 credits), Ultra $300/mo (150,000 credits). Ray 3.2 video: 1080p text-to-video 400 credits/5s, 720p 100 credits/5s, Draft 20 credits/5s; Seedance 2.0 1080p 240 credits/sec, 4K 959 credits/sec.	Image credits: Uni-1 30 credits/image, Seedream 1-3 credits/image, GPT Image 2 from 3 (Low-1K) to 255 (High-4K) credits. Audio: ElevenLabs v3 TTS 21 credits/1,000 chars. Utilities: background removal 1 credit/image, reframe video 32 credits/sec, upscale to 4K 17 credits/sec.	❌ Proxy required (no mainland China direct access; API served from global AWS/GCP edge regions)	No permanent free API tier. New users get a small one-time free credit grant on the platform, but sustained API usage requires at least the Plus plan at $30/mo (10,000 credits).	View Details →
Runway	Gen-4 Turbo, Gen-4 Alpha	Gen-4 Turbo: 50 credits/5s clip (~$0.50), Gen-4 Alpha: 100 credits/5s (~$1.00), Act-Two: 150 credits/5s (~$1.50), Frames: 200 credits/sequence (~$2.00)	Credit-based system (~$0.01/credit). Credit packs: $12 (1,000 credits) to $200 (25,000 credits). Enterprise: custom pricing.	❌ Proxy required (AWS US-East + GCP US-Central hosting)	No free API tier. Minimum $12 for 1,000 credits (~20 Gen-4 Turbo clips). Free web app available but no API access.	View Details →
TwelveLabs	Pegasus 1.5 (flagship multimodal video understanding: frames + audio + speech + on-screen text), Pegasus 1.2 (previous-gen, lower-cost option: frames + audio + speech)	Free plan: 600 minutes of video indexing at no cost. Pegasus 1.2 video indexing $0.042/min (one-time), input video $0.021/min, output text $0.0075/1k tokens, embedding infrastructure $0.0015/indexed minute/month. Developer plan upgrades indexes past 90 days and unlocks higher rate limits.	Identical per-minute and per-1k-tokens billing. Marengo embeddings billed by indexed minute. No subscription fee on Developer plan beyond per-usage costs.	❌ Proxy required (no mainland China direct endpoint; API hosted on AWS us-west-2 / us-east-1; SDKs available in Python / Node / Go / Java)	Free plan: 600 minutes of free video indexing on signup (cumulative, no credit card required). Full API surface available (Pegasus 1.2 / 1.5, Marengo 3.0, Search, Embed, Analyze & Segment). Index retention is 90 days on Free; upgrading to Developer lifts retention to unlimited.	View Details →
Mixedbread AI	Toast 1 — specialized search model (2026-08-13): matches/outperforms Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on knowledge work, up to 10x cheaper and 12x faster; input $0.50 / cached $0.06 / output $1.20 per 1M LLM tokens (launch $0.30 / $0.036 / $0.72), mxbai-embed-large-v1 — 1,024-dimension open embedding model (Apache-2.0), 50M+ downloads across the mxbai family	Usage-based across three buckets: Indexing (Fast $1.50/1M content tokens; High Quality with OCR/transcription/summaries/multimodal enrichment $3/1M), Search (Grep $0.10/1K queries, Semantic $4/1K, Toast 1 $1/1K; rerank adds $3.50 or $1.50/1K), and Storage $0.50/1M content tokens per month. Toast 1 also bills input $0.50/1M LLM tokens (launch $0.30).	Toast 1 output $1.20/1M LLM tokens (launch $0.72, 40% off); cached input $0.06/1M (launch $0.036), cache writes free. Semantic search rerank adds $3.50/1K queries.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Mixedbread is a US/Europe-based platform (legal entity mixedbread ai inc., Berlin/San Francisco), so direct access from the mainland requires a proxy or relay, with cross-Pacific first-byte latency typically 150-250ms.	Starter plan grants $5 in one-time credits with no card required; 3 workspace users, 10 stores, 100 requests/minute — enough to evaluate a real corpus. No permanent free tier.	View Details →
Crusoe	DeepSeek V3 0324 (legacy frontier: $0.50 input / $1.50 output per 1M tokens), DeepSeek V4 Flash (efficient frontier: $0.14 input / $0.28 output per 1M tokens, 70B tier)	Pay-as-you-go per 1 million tokens, four parameter-count tiers: <16B ($0.40) / 16B-70B ($2.50) / 70B-300B ($6.00) / >300B ($10.00). Serverless Fine-Tuning uses the identical 4-tier structure. Managed Inference covers DeepSeek V3 0324, V4 Pro, V4 Flash, GLM 5.1/5.2, GPT-OSS 20B/120B, Gemma 4 31B-it, Kimi K2.6, Llama 3.1 8B / 3.3 70B, Nemotron 3 family (VoiceChat/Ultra 550B/3.5 Lightning/3 Nano/3 Super/Nano Omni 30B), Qwen3 8B/235B A22B Instruct 2507/Qwen3.5 2B+9B/Qwen3.6 35B A3B, Yutori n1.5. Cached tokens billed at $0.03-$1.50 per 1M.	Self-Serve Deployments: NVIDIA H100 80GB HGX $5.50/hr, NVIDIA H200 141GB HGX $6.00/hr (dedicated endpoints for open and fine-tuned models). Tailored Deployments and Provisioned Throughput negotiated via sales. Managed Kubernetes $0.10/cluster-hour; Container Registry $0.10/GiB-month; Object Storage $0.06/GiB-month.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Managed Inference API hosted at Crusoe's US data centers (Colorado, Texas, and other US locations); China access requires proxy.	No permanent free tier; pay-as-you-go only. Volume discounts via sales contact. Serverless Fine-Tuning starts at $0.40/M tokens for sub-16B models.	View Details →
Letta	Letta Agents SDK — open-source stateful agent runtime (Apache-2.0), with first-class persistent memory (core/archival/recall blocks) and runtime memory editing, Letta Code (`@letta-ai/letta-code`, Node.js 22.19+) — memory-first CLI coding agent, #1 on Terminal-Bench (Dec 2025 launch)	Usage-based: Free $0 (up to 3 stateful agents, BYOK), Pro $20/mo (up to 20 agents, Letta Auto weekly + monthly quota + pay-as-you-go overage), Teams Pro per seat (shared agents + permissions), Developer Plan API-key billing with pure credit usage (no agent cap), Enterprise sales-quoted (self-hosting / custom models). Server-side tools bill CPU time at $0.00015/sec.	Letta Auto usage above the Pro plan's included quota falls back to pay-as-you-go at the model's listed rate (see platform.letta.com/models). Mods, Skills, and Conversations are included in plans, not billed separately. Remote MCP tools run on the MCP provider — no Letta credit cost.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Letta, Inc. is registered in San Francisco and platform.letta.com is a single global endpoint, so production traffic from mainland China requires a proxy or relay (typical cross-Pacific first-byte latency ~150-250ms). The agent harness is fully open-source (Apache-2.0), so self-hosting on your own infrastructure is a viable workaround.	Free $0/mo with up to 3 stateful agents and BYOK; Letta Auto and Skills are throttled — usable for evaluation and small personal-assistant use cases.	View Details →
Reka	Reka Core — top-tier multimodal model (text + image + audio + video); input $2.00 / output $6.00 per 1M tokens, image $0.02 / video $0.08 / audio $0.02 per minute, Reka Flash — cost-efficient model for everyday tasks (text + image + audio + video); input $0.80 / output $2.00 per 1M tokens, image $0.01 / video $0.06 / audio $0.015 per minute	Reka Edge $0.10/M input; Reka Flash $0.80/M; Reka Core $2.00/M; Reka Flash Research bills per 1K requests ($25 standard, $35 parallel-low, $60 parallel-high). Pure usage-based with no minimum commitment.	Reka Edge $0.10/M; Reka Flash $2.00/M; Reka Core $6.00/M. Multimodal usage (image, video, audio) bills separately per minute: Flash video $0.06/min, Core $0.08/min; images billed per call (Flash $0.01, Core $0.02).	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Reka is registered at 530 Lawrence Expressway, Sunnyvale, CA; api.reka.ai is a single global endpoint, so production traffic from mainland China requires a proxy or relay (typical cross-Pacific first-byte latency ~150-250ms). The open weights can be self-hosted on NVIDIA GPUs with ≥24GB VRAM via vLLM to bypass direct-access limits.	Sign up at platform.reka.ai to obtain an API key; billing is purely pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment, so teams can prototype with a small top-up. No permanent free tier or monthly free credit.	View Details →
Aleph Alpha	Pharia-1-LLM-7B-control, Pharia-1-LLM-7B-control-aligned	Enterprise contract — no public per-token price (quote-based; PhariaAI on-prem deployment custom-priced)	Same — enterprise quote, no public per-token list	❌ Not applicable (German sovereign-AI vendor, subject to EU export controls)	No public free tier — self-serve signup creates an account, but pricing is enterprise contract only	View Details →
Modal	B300 / B200 / H200 / H100 / A100 / L40S / A10 / L4 / T4 (GPU), Self-hosted LLM inference (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM)	Per GPU-second: H100 $0.001097/s, A100 80GB $0.000694/s, T4 $0.000164/s	Same as input (per GPU-second, no idle fees)	❌ Proxy required (infrastructure on AWS/GCP overseas regions; direct CN access unreliable)		View Details →
AssemblyAI	Universal-3.5 Pro (Async, 18 languages, native code switching, best diarization), Universal-2 (Async, 99 languages, balanced accuracy)	Per audio hour: Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hr, Universal-2 $0.15/hr (pre-recorded)	N/A (speech-to-text billed on audio duration, no token concept)	❌ Proxy required (US-based infrastructure, CN direct access unreliable)		View Details →
Together AI	DeepSeek V4 Pro, Qwen3.6-Plus / Qwen3.7-Max	$0.03-$1.74/MTok (model-dependent)	$0.12-$4.50/MTok (model-dependent)	❌ Proxy required (US-based service)	$1 initial credit on signup (requires payment method)	View Details →
Nscale	Moonshot AI Kimi K2.5 — open chat model via serverless inference; per-1M input/output token pricing (verified on nscale.com/product/inference featured model list), Alibaba Cloud Qwen3 8B / Qwen3 4B Thinking / Qwen3 4B Instruct — open chat models with reasoning variants; per-1M token pricing	Nscale uses credit-based pay-as-you-go billing with per-model rates quoted per 1M input tokens (text models) in the Nscale Console (AI Services → Models) and via the /v1/models API endpoint; image models bill input as 0. The pricing structure is verified against the ModelPricing schema in serverless-openapi.yaml (input = USD per 1M input tokens).	Output bills per 1M output tokens (text models); image models bill per million output pixels (ModelPricing.output defined as per-million output pixels). Exact per-model USD rates are shown in the Console and /v1/models once you top up credit.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. inference.api.nscale.com is a single global endpoint; data centers concentrate in Europe (Loughton UK, Glomfjord/Narvik Norway) and the US (Texas, West Virginia), so China production traffic needs a proxy and transatlantic/transpacific first-byte latency is typically 200-350ms. The platform emphasizes EU data sovereignty and in-country processing, which suits European compliance workloads more than China-region low latency.	No permanent free tier. New users sign up via Google SSO; the quickstart notes early users may be eligible for free promotional credits (not guaranteed). By default you must top up credit before calling the serverless inference API.	View Details →
Morph	Kimi K3 (2.8T MoE) — flagship Fable-tier open-weight model at ~100 tok/s with 1M context; per-1M input/output token pricing (verified on docs.morphllm.com llms.txt Fast Models table 2026-08-28), GLM-5.2 (744B MoE) — Opus-tier open-weight model with 1M context; OpenAI `service_tier` parameter supported for default/standby processing	Per-model billing quoted per 1M input tokens (text models). Verified against docs.morphllm.com llms.txt Fast Models table (2026-08-28): Kimi K3 $2.90, Qwen 3.5 397B $0.50, GLM-5.2 744B $1.10, GLM-5.3-Flash $0.15, MiniMax M3 $0.30, MiniMax M2.7 $0.279, DeepSeek V4 Flash (beta) $0.12, Qwen 3.8/3.6 27B $0.289, Gemma 4 31B $0.14. Qwen 3.5 397B cached input bills at $0.30 per 1M; other models have no separate cache rate. Fast Apply via the `auto` model bills at OpenRouter-verified rates (morph-v3-fast $0.0008/$0.0012 per 1k, morph-v3-large $0.0009/$0.0019 per 1k); Compact, Reflexes, WarpGrep, and Router bill per event (see dedicated sections below).	Per-model billing quoted per 1M output tokens (text models). Verified against docs.morphllm.com llms.txt: Kimi K3 $14.00, Qwen 3.5 397B $3.50, GLM-5.2 744B $4.10, GLM-5.3-Flash $0.50, MiniMax M3 $1.20, MiniMax M2.7 $1.20, DeepSeek V4 Flash (beta) $0.278, Qwen 3.8/3.6 27B $2.40, Gemma 4 31B $0.40. Fast Apply output is morph-v3-fast $1.20 / morph-v3-large $1.90 per 1M tokens; the recommended `auto` route bills per the routed model. GLM-5.2 `service_tier: standby` runs at the same per-token rates (best-effort capacity, no SLA, returns 429 with `Retry-After` when over 25% utilization).	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Base URL https://api.morphllm.com is a single global endpoint, hosted by AutoInfra, Inc. (YC-backed US company). OpenRouter routes morph/morph-v3-fast and morph/morph-v3-large through multi-region, but the official Morph API is not available from mainland China without a proxy. China production traffic sees typical 200-400 ms transpacific first-byte latency.	No permanent free tier (no zero-cost starter plan). New signups get an API key and are billed pay-as-you-go from the first token. Morph offers up to $5,000 in Startup Credits for qualified startups, applied via a separate sales contact form (morphllm.com home page). The homepage CTA 'Start free. Get API Key' refers to signup friction, not to a free quota.	View Details →
Firecrawl	Scrape (v2 /scrape) — convert any URL into clean markdown / HTML / structured JSON via the JSON-mode schema option; 1 credit per page, Crawl (v2 /crawl) — recursively crawl a website and return content for every linked page; 1 credit per page scraped	Pure credit-based billing, consumption per endpoint and feature, monthly reset per plan; extra credits sold in $5 batches (1k–5k credits per batch depending on plan). Verified against firecrawl.dev/pricing + docs.firecrawl.dev/billing.md (2026-08-29): Free 1k credits/mo at $0; Hobby 5k at $19/mo ($16/mo billed yearly); Standard 100k at $83/mo (yearly ~$99/mo); Growth 500k at $333/mo (yearly ~$399/mo); Scale 1M at $599/mo; Enterprise Custom. Per-call credit costs: Scrape / Crawl / Map 1 cr/page, Search 2 cr/10 results (rounded up), Monitor 1 cr/page/check, Interact 2 cr/minute (Playwright) or 7 cr/minute (prompt-driven, 1-min minimum). Batch Scrape and Extract inherit the same per-URL / per-call credit costs. Agent gives 5 daily runs free, then dynamic usage-based pricing.	No separate output dimension — Firecrawl returns scraped markdown / HTML / JSON content, billed only against the input credit cost and concurrent-browser occupancy. The data returned is not separately metered; the only output-side caveat is enterprise ZDR Search, which carries a custom rate negotiated per contract.	❌ No mainland China direct endpoint. Firecrawl is headquartered in San Francisco (Y Combinator W23 batch) with a single-region API base URL at https://api.firecrawl.dev; the billing and rate-limits docs do not list any Asia-Pacific or China routing layer. China production traffic requires a proxy or transit, with typical 200-400 ms transpacific first-byte latency. The Free tier's 1,000 credits work behind a proxy for evaluation, but stable production traffic should either run a self-hosted Firecrawl deployment (Docker / Kubernetes) or sit behind a corporate proxy.	Permanent Free tier: 1,000 credits per month with no credit card required, full access to Scrape / Crawl / Map / Search / Batch Scrape / JSON mode and every other endpoint; 2 concurrent browsers and a 50,000 max queued jobs ceiling. Designed for evaluation and low-volume use; credits reset at the start of each month and do not roll over. Agent's 5-daily-free runs apply across every plan, including Free.	View Details →
Chutes	Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B-TEE (frontier open-weights reasoning MoE, 262K ctx, $0.45/$3.00 per 1M, hosted on confidential TEE compute), moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6-TEE (262K ctx, $0.58/$3.40 per 1M; flagship Kimi line on decentralized net)	Per-token pay-as-you-go, quoted per 1M input tokens (verified on chutes.ai/api/models 2026-09-06): Qwen3.5-397B-A17B $0.45, DeepSeek-V3.2 $1.00, DeepSeek-V4-Flash $0.44, Kimi-K2.6 $0.58, GLM-5.2 $1.25, Qwen3-32B $0.104, Gemma-4-31B $0.12, Qwen3.6-27B $0.30, Qwen3.8-27B $0.32	Per 1M output: Qwen3.5-397B $3.00, DeepSeek-V3.2 $1.00, DeepSeek-V4-Flash $1.32, Kimi-K2.6 $3.40, GLM-5.2 $3.95, Qwen3-32B $0.416, Gemma-4-31B $0.37, Qwen3.8-27B $2.50	❌ Proxy required for mainland China. Chutes is a decentralized, Bittensor-powered inference network for open-weights models, served behind a single global endpoint (https://llm.chutes.ai). There is no mainland-China regional endpoint, no China payment method, and no CN data-residency option; mainland production traffic needs a proxy or aggregator.	No free tier — the official FAQ states 'We do not offer a free tier at this time. Top up your account in the app.' Pure pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment; optional monthly subscriptions Plus $10/mo (6% off beyond quota) and Pro $20/mo (10% off) bundle a daily request quota. 25+ Stripe payment methods (crypto, cards, bank transfers) plus TAO / Bittensor alpha tokens are accepted.	View Details →
Azure OpenAI	GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini	GPT-4o: $2.50/M, GPT-4o-mini: $0.15/M, o1: $15/M, o3: $10/M	GPT-4o: $10/M, GPT-4o-mini: $0.60/M, o1: $60/M, o3: $40/M	⚠️ Available via 21Vianet (restricted model set)		View Details →
OpenRouter	GPT-4o, Claude Opus/Sonnet/Haiku	$0.005 to $150.00 per 1M tokens, median $0.500 (across 445 models, free models excluded)	$0.030 to $600.00 per 1M tokens, median $2.000 (across 443 models, free models excluded)	⚠️ Partial (not blocked in China but unstable)		View Details →
Bifrost (by Maxim)	1,000+ models from 23+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure OpenAI, Cohere, Mistral, Groq, Cerebras, Ollama, Hugging Face, Replicate + custom self-deployed models), All OpenAI chat models (GPT-4o / GPT-5 / GPT-6 family) routed via openai/* prefix	OSS: $0 (Apache-2.0 self-hosted); upstream model token rates pass through with no markup	OSS: $0 (Apache-2.0 self-hosted); upstream model token rates pass through with no markup	⚠️ Self-hosted software, no managed endpoint; deployable to any cloud (incl. Alibaba/HuaweiCloud) with self-hosted upstream (Ollama/vLLM) for data-residency	Apache-2.0 OSS tier is free forever (Docker / K8s / Go binary / npx); 14-day Enterprise free trial	View Details →
Hugging Face	200,000+ community models (Llama 3.3 70B, DeepSeek-R1, Qwen 2.5 72B, Mistral 7B, Gemma 2 27B, Phi-3, StarCoder2 + 1,800+ new models per day), All OpenAI chat models routed via any of 18 Inference Providers (Together, Fireworks, Replicate, Groq, Cohere, Cerebras, DeepInfra, Fal, Featherless, Novita, Nscale, OVHcloud AI Endpoints, Public AI, Scaleway, WaveSpeedAI, Z.ai, Baseten, HF Inference)	Free $0.10 inference credits, then $0.05-$3.00/M tokens depending on model via Inference Providers; PRO $9/mo includes 20x more inference credits; Enterprise $2/seat/mo	Same as input per Inference Provider; multi-provider rate cards visible on huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing	⚠️ huggingface.co blocked in mainland China; workarounds include hf-mirror.com mirror or self-hosted Inference Endpoints on a domestic cloud (Alibaba / Tencent)	$0.10 monthly inference credits for free users; 200,000+ models readable; Spaces + Datasets free hosting; Inference API rate-limited	View Details →
Vercel AI Gateway	OpenAI GPT-4o / GPT-4o-mini / GPT-5.x, Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 / Sonnet 4	Free tier: $5/mo AI Gateway Credits; Paid: pay-as-you-go at provider list rates with zero markup	Zero markup on tokens (incl. BYOK); add-on features billed separately	⚠️ Proxy required (China needs VPN)	$5/month free AI Gateway Credits per team (Free-Tier eligible models only)	View Details →
Eden AI	openai/gpt-5.6-luna, openai/gpt-5	Pay the provider's exact list price + a 5.5% Eden AI platform fee per API call	Same: provider's exact list price, no markup. Each API response includes the exact cost in USD.	⚠️ HQ in France; EU endpoint (api.eu.edenai.run) keeps data in Europe for GDPR/AI Act. Mainland China access typically requires overseas egress (200-400ms avg latency).	No subscription — buy prepaid credits via Stripe at any size; Self-serve plan default 10 req/sec (upgradable to 15 req/sec on request)	View Details →
IBM watsonx.ai	ibm/granite-4.2-3b, ibm/granite-4.2-8b	Per-1M-token input pricing spans $0.06 (Granite 4 H Small) to $3.00 (Mistral Large / Mistral Medium 2505) per Calcaas's 2026-09 catalog	Per-1M-token output pricing spans $0.10 (Granite Guardian 3.2 2B / Llama 3.2 1B) to $10.00 (Mistral Large / Mistral Medium 2505) per Calcaas's 2026-09 catalog	⚠️ IBM watsonx.ai hosts data centers in us-south / us-east (US) and eu-de / eu-gb (EU); mainland China access requires overseas egress (200-400ms typical latency); Enterprise tier supports on-prem deployment on IBM Z / LinuxONE to bypass cross-border routing	New IBM Cloud accounts receive trial credits (amount varies by promotion); Lite plan includes a limited free monthly call quota for model evaluation	View Details →
Thinking Machines (Inkling)	Inkling (open-weight MoE, 975B total / 41B active, 1M ctx claimed, 256K on serverless; text+image+audio input; $1.00/$4.05 per 1M), Inkling-Small (open-weight MoE, 276B total / 12B active, native audio+vision, best-in-family on reasoning and agentic coding; $0.30/$1.20 per 1M)	Tinker serverless inference (256K tier): Inkling-Small $0.30/M, Inkling $1.00/M; cached input $0.06/M and $0.17/M respectively. Tinker training (64K / 256K tiers): Inkling prefill $1.87/$3.74, Inkling-Small $0.58/$1.16 (all limited-time 50% off; original rates are double)	Serverless inference (256K tier): Inkling-Small $1.20/M, Inkling $4.05/M. Training sample rates: Inkling $4.68 at 64K / $9.36 at 256K, Inkling-Small $1.44 / $2.89; train rates: Inkling $5.61 at 64K (original $11.22) / $11.23 at 256K, Inkling-Small $1.73 / $3.47	⚠️ No mainland China endpoint — proxy required; weights are downloadable for self-hosting	Fully open weights on Hugging Face — self-hosting is a zero-API-cost path	View Details →
Novita AI	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.59/M, DeepSeek-V3: $1.00/M	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.79/M, DeepSeek-V3: $1.00/M	⚠️ Partial (Singapore node, acceptable latency from China)		View Details →
Baseten	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Per-second GPU billing (H100: $1.89/hr, A100: $0.83/hr, L40S: $0.54/hr)	Model-dependent (inference time × GPU rate)	⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China)	$30 in inference credits on signup (valid 30 days); custom model hosting free tier: 1 deployed model	View Details →
Tavily	Search (real-time web + AI summary, 1 credit/call), Extract (clean markdown from URL, 1 credit/page)	Free 1,000 credits/month (rolling 30-day window, no credit card); Pay-as-you-go $0.008/credit (base Search 1 credit); Project from $30/month with 4,000 credits, $0.008/credit overage; Growth $200/month with 40,000 credits, $0.006/credit overage; Pro $1,000/month with 250,000 credits, $0.005/credit overage; Enterprise contract (custom quota + SLA + no-logs addendum)	Per-endpoint billing: Search 1 credit/call; Extract 1 credit/page; Crawl 1 credit/page; Map 1 credit/page; Research 5 credits/call (replaces 5-10 Search + 2-3 Extract + 1 synthesis LLM); AI Extraction 1 credit/call	⚠️ Tavily API hosted on AWS US-East / EU-West; direct access from mainland China 200-400ms latency; recommended Cloudflare Worker or Tencent Cloud Edge Function proxy (50-100ms); no CN node planned; no domestic payment channels	Free forever: 1,000 credits/month (rolling 30-day window), no credit card, no feature gating; Search/Extract/Crawl/Map/AI Extraction each have separate quotas (1,000 Search + 500 Crawl); overage returns HTTP 429, no surprise billing	View Details →
Lepton AI	Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B	Llama 3.3 70B: $0.80/M; Llama 3.1 405B: $3.50/M; Qwen 2.5 72B: $0.80/M; DeepSeek-R1: $2.00/M	Same rate as input for most models (symmetric pricing)	⚠️ Partially available (ap-northeast-1 Tokyo region is closest; China access requires proxy)	$5 in credits valid for 30 days (enough to fully evaluate any flagship model)	View Details →
ElevenLabs	Eleven Multilingual v2, Eleven Turbo v2.5	TTS: $0.03-0.30/1K chars depending on model/quality; STT: $0.47/hour; Sound Effects: $0.04/request	Same as input rate per model	⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China)		View Details →
Deepgram	Nova-3 (STT, Monolingual), Nova-3 (STT, Multilingual)	STT: $0.0043-0.012/min; TTS: $0.015-0.030/1K chars	N/A	⚠️ Partially available (proxy required, no mainland China data center)		View Details →
RunPod	B300 288GB HBM3e, B200 180GB	Per-second GPU: H100 SXM $2.99/hr, A100 SXM $1.49/hr, B200 $5.89/hr, L40S $0.99/hr, RTX 4090 $0.69/hr	Same as input (per-GPU-second — no idle fees, no egress fees)	⚠️ Partially available (31 global regions; CN direct access unstable — proxy recommended)	$5 starter credit on signup, no credit card required; per-second billing means spiky workloads never pay for idle	View Details →
Voyage AI	voyage-4-large, voyage-4	voyage-4-large: $0.12/M, voyage-4: $0.06/M, voyage-4-lite: $0.02/M, voyage-context-3: $0.18/M, voyage-code-3: $0.18/M, voyage-multimodal-3.5: $0.12/M	（embedding API — no output tokens; rerank-2.5: $0.05/M tokens, rerank-2.5-lite: $0.02/M tokens）	⚠️ Partial (site accessible from China, API stability in mainland China unverified)	200M free tokens per account (text embedding + reranker), 50M free tokens for legacy domain models	View Details →
Poolside	Laguna S 2.1 (118B total / 8B active MoE, 1M context, agentic coding flagship; $0.09/$0.18 per 1M + $0.009 cached input), Laguna XS 2.1 (33B total / 3B active MoE, 256K context, runs on 36GB-RAM Mac; $0.06/$0.12 per 1M + $0.003 cached input)	Laguna S 2.1: $0.09/M input; Laguna XS 2.1: $0.06/M input; cached input $0.009/M and $0.003/M respectively (10x cache discount on both)	Laguna S 2.1: $0.18/M output; Laguna XS 2.1: $0.12/M output	⚠️ No mainland China endpoint — proxy required; weights are downloadable for self-hosting under OpenMDW-1.1 license	OpenRouter hosts rate-limited free Laguna S 2.1 :free and Laguna XS 2.1 :free variants; chat.poolside.ai browser sandbox needs no signup	View Details →
Weaviate	Snowflake Arctic-embed-m-v1.5, Snowflake Arctic-embed-m-v2.0	Free forever: 100,000 objects + 1 collection + 7-day backup; Flex monthly from $45 + $0.00465/1M vector dim + $0.12/GiB storage; Premium prepaid from $400/mo	Dedicated contract from $400/mo; separate dimensions of vector dim, storage, backup billed independently; Embeddings billed per token	⚠️ Servers in AWS/GCP regions, ~200-400ms latency from China	Free forever: 100,000 objects, 1 collection, 7-day backup; 2,000 Embedding requests/day; Query Agent 1,000 req/mo	View Details →
Writer	Palmyra X5, Palmyra X4	Palmyra X5: $0.60/M, Palmyra X4: $2.50/M	Palmyra X5: $6.00/M, Palmyra X4: $10.00/M	⚠️ Partial (site accessible from China, API stability unverified)	14-day free trial, no credit card required (Starter plan)	View Details →
Qdrant	FastEmbed: BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5, FastEmbed: BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5	Free forever: 1 GB storage + 0.5M vectors; Cloud Standard from $25/mo (prepaid $250/yr) with $0.06/GB-mo storage; Cloud Pro from $80/mo with $0.04/GB-mo + high IOPS; Dedicated contract from $2,500/mo	Storage + optional Power Tier billing; no per-API-call fees, no per-vector embedding fees; FastEmbed runs locally per token; BYO embeddings billed by third-party API	⚠️ Cloud runs on AWS Frankfurt / N. Virginia / Sydney regions, ~200-400ms latency from mainland China; OSS can be self-hosted in Tencent/Aliyun CN regions	Free forever: 1 GB storage + 0.5M 1015-dim vectors; 2 CPU/0.5 GiB RAM instance; unlimited API requests; community Discord support	View Details →
Cartesia	Sonic (real-time TTS), Sonic 2 (multilingual, voice cloning)	Sonic: $0.03/1K chars (Standard), $0.06/1K chars (Pro), $0.12/1K chars (Turbo); Sonic 2: $0.04-0.15/1K chars	TTS character-based pricing (output = audio), per-second for streaming	⚠️ Partially available (stable proxy recommended in China)	10,000 characters/month free tier (≈10 minutes), no credit card required	View Details →
Pinecone	Serverless (Standard / Enterprise), Pod-based (s1 / p1 / p2)	Serverless Standard: $50/月最低,$4-$4.50/M读单元,$16-$18/M写单元,$0.0005/ingestion单元	Serverless Enterprise: $500/月最低,$6-$6.75/M读,$24-$27/M写,$0.001/ingestion单元(multi-modal);Pod-based按节点小时计费	⚠️ SaaS-only — no open-source self-host option (proprietary managed service)		View Details →
Liquid AI	LFM2.5-8B-A1B (MoE, 8B total / 1.5B active, 128K context) — open weights, free download / run / fine-tune under the LFM Open License (royalty-free until $10M annual revenue), LFM2.5-2.6B (dense, 128K context, agentic tool calling) — DSpark draft variant up to 3.18× GPU / 2.87× on-device decode speedup	No per-token cloud API pricing — LFM weights are free to download, run, and fine-tune under the LFM Open License (royalty-free until your company exceeds $10M annual revenue). Inference is self-hosted on your own hardware or deployed on-device via the LEAP SDK; there are no per-request fees.	No per-token output billing. Models run locally or self-hosted on CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs — positioned for latency- and privacy-sensitive, high-frequency, or offline workloads (Liquid's framing: "why pay per token for a cloud API instead of running on-device").	⚠️ No managed cloud API, so there is no China direct-connect issue. Model weights download freely and run locally or self-hosted, including inside mainland China (data-sovereignty friendly). No cloud API gateway or proxy needed; token processing happens entirely on local hardware.	All 14+ LFM models are free to download, run, and fine-tune under the LFM Open License — including commercially (until your company exceeds $10M annual revenue). Research, education, and non-profit use is always free with no revenue limit.	View Details →
OVHcloud AI Endpoints	gpt-oss-120b (reasoning LLM, 117B params, 131K ctx, EUR 0.08/0.40; USD 0.09/0.47), gpt-oss-20b (reasoning LLM, 21B params, 131K ctx, EUR 0.04/0.15; USD 0.05/0.18)	Billed per 1M tokens. EUR catalog rates: gpt-oss-20b 0.04, gpt-oss-120b 0.08, Qwen3-Coder-30B 0.07, Qwen3.5-9B 0.10, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B 0.10, Mistral-7B 0.11, Qwen3.8-27B / 3.6-27B 0.40, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B 0.60, Llama-3.3-70B 0.67, Qwen2.5-VL-72B 0.91; embeddings bge-m3 0.01 and Qwen3-Embedding-8B 0.10	Billed per 1M tokens. EUR catalog rates: Qwen3.5-9B 0.15, gpt-oss-20b 0.15, Qwen3-Coder-30B 0.26, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B 0.31, gpt-oss-120b 0.40, Llama-3.3-70B 0.67, Qwen3.8-27B / 3.6-27B 2.70, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B 3.60; output runs roughly 2.5x to 6x the input rate	⚠️ Proxy required for mainland China. This is a European sovereign endpoint (Gravelines, France) with no mainland-China region; OVHcloud's own Batch comparison table lists availability as WW (out of US). Mainland production traffic needs a proxy or aggregator.	Free playground across all catalog models; anonymous tier of 2 req/min with no API key; Batch API free during the two-month Beta; Qwen3Guard, image generation and TTS models listed at 0	View Details →
FriendliAI	GLM-5.2, GLM-5.1	From $0.14/M (Gemma-4-31B) to $1.4/M (GLM-5.2/5.1); Whisper $0.0015/audio min	From $0.4/M (Gemma-4-31B) to $4.4/M (GLM-5.2/5.1)	⚠️ US + Korea servers, ~200-400ms latency from China	No free tier — per-token billing, no minimum	View Details →
Upstage (Solar)	Solar Pro 4 (agentic flagship, 512K ctx, 128K max output, $0.30/$1.20; 90% off thru Sep 10 2026, 70% off thru Oct 10), Solar Pro 3 (previous-gen flagship, 128K ctx, $0.15/$0.60)	Solar Pro 4: $0.30/M list (launch promo: 90% off = $0.03/M through 2026-09-10; 70% off = $0.09/M through 2026-10-10); Solar Pro 3 / Pro 2: $0.15/M	Solar Pro 4: $1.20/M list (promo $0.12/M then $0.36/M); cached input $0.06/M list ($0.006 then $0.018 in promo); Solar Pro 3 / Pro 2: $0.60/M	⚠️ Proxy or OpenRouter from mainland China; on-premises and dedicated deployment available	10 free Studio agent runs (no credit card required)	View Details →
Suno	v5.5 (latest model, royalty-free music), v5 (premium model)	Free: $0 (10 songs/day, non-commercial); Pro: $10/mo (500 songs, commercial rights); Premier: $30/mo (2,000 songs, Studio)	Annual: Pro $96/yr (20% off), Premier $288/yr (20% off); credit top-ups available as add-ons	⚠️ Limited access from China (stable overseas proxy required), no official China endpoints	Free tier: 10 songs per day (non-commercial use only), no credit card required, available immediately on signup	View Details →
Xiaomi MiMo	mimo-v2.6-flash (309B MoE / 15B active, 1M ctx, $0.14/$0.28, cached $0.0028), mimo-v2.6-pro (1T+ MoE / ~15B active, 1M ctx, $0.435/$0.87, cached $0.0036)	Per 1M tokens: mimo-v2.6-flash $0.14, mimo-v2.6-pro $0.435, mimo-v2.6-pro-ultraspeed $4.35, mimo-v2.5 $0.40, mimo-v2.5-pro $0.48	Per 1M tokens: mimo-v2.6-flash $0.28, mimo-v2.6-pro $0.87, mimo-v2.6-pro-ultraspeed $8.70, mimo-v2.5 $2.00, mimo-v2.5-pro $1.80	⚠️ Chinese company but no mainland-China endpoint on the OpenRouter route; proxy or latency measurement required. Xiaomi own portal at mimo.xiaomi.com may serve China traffic, not verified from our test environment.	No free tier; pure pay-as-you-go	View Details →
Relace	relace-search (own, BF16, 256K ctx, $1.00/$3.00, Fast Agentic Search), relace-apply-3 (own, FP8, 256K ctx, $0.85/$1.25, Instant Apply)	Per 1M tokens (live Relace endpoints on OpenRouter, 2026-11-02): glm-5.2 $0.0065, deepseek-v4.1-flash $0.035, glm-5.3-flash $0.0285, deepseek-v4-flash $0.05, glm-5.3 $0.0703, kimi-k3 $0.1824, deepseek-v4-pro $0.90, relace-apply-3 $0.85, relace-search $1.00	Per 1M tokens (live Relace endpoints on OpenRouter, 2026-11-02): glm-5.3-flash $0.0923, deepseek-v4-pro $1.50, relace-apply-3 $1.25, relace-search $3.00, deepseek-v4-flash $0.45, deepseek-v4.1-flash $0.50, glm-5.3 $4.3843, glm-5.2 $7.9057, kimi-k3 $9.3388	⚠️ Overseas service with no mainland-China-optimized endpoint; China latency needs measurement. Code-related API defaults are not designed for mainland-China compliance scenarios.	No traditional free token tier; free accounts are rate-limited to 15 requests per minute	View Details →
Aion Labs	aion-3.5 (multi-model GLM system, 256K ctx, $3.00/$6.00, cached $0.75), aion-3.5-mini (multi-model GLM system, 256K ctx, $0.70/$1.40, cached $0.18)	Per 1M tokens (Aion Labs docs and OpenRouter identical, 2026-11-03): aion-3.5-mini $0.70, aion-3.0-mini $0.70, aion-2.0 $0.80, aion-rp-llama-3.1-8b $0.80, aion-3.5 $3.00, aion-3.0 $3.00	Per 1M tokens (Aion Labs docs and OpenRouter identical, 2026-11-03): aion-3.5-mini $1.40, aion-3.0-mini $1.40, aion-2.0 $1.60, aion-rp-llama-3.1-8b $1.60, aion-3.5 $6.00, aion-3.0 $6.00	⚠️ Poland-based service with no mainland-China-optimized endpoint; China latency needs measurement. No regional data residency guarantees.	Daily credit allowance free tier, no credit card required; rate-limited to 15 requests/min, 20K tokens/min, 20K tokens/day	View Details →
Scaleway Generative APIs	qwen3-embedding-8b (Embeddings, 32k ctx, EUR 0.10/M input, output free), bge-multilingual-gemma2 (Embeddings, 8k ctx, EUR 0.10/M input, output free)	Billed per 1M tokens, EUR list prices before tax: qwen3-embedding-8b and bge-multilingual-gemma2 0.10, mistral-small-3.2 0.15, gpt-oss-120b 0.15, gemma-4-26b-a4b-it and qwen3.6-35b-a3b 0.25, deepseek-v4-flash-0731 0.40, deepseek-v4.1-flash / qwen3.5-397b-a17b / qwen3.8-27b 0.60, qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507 0.75, llama-3.3-70b-instruct 0.90, mistral-medium-3.5-128b 1.50, glm-5.3 and glm-5.2 1.80, lightonocr-3-0.8b 2.20	Billed per 1M tokens, EUR list prices before tax: gemma-4-26b-a4b-it 0.50, gpt-oss-120b 0.60, deepseek-v4-flash-0731 0.80, llama-3.3-70b-instruct 0.90, qwen3.6-35b-a3b 1.50, qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507 2.25, qwen3.8-27b 3.30, qwen3.5-397b-a17b 3.60, glm-5.3 and glm-5.2 5.50, mistral-medium-3.5-128b 7.50; embeddings and OCR carry no output charge	⚠️ Proxy required for mainland China. The service runs in a single region (Paris, France) inside the EU, so latency and stability from the Chinese mainland need your own measurement	The free tier covers the first 1,000,000 tokens and includes 60 minutes of audio transcription; billing starts at token number 1,000,001	View Details →
DeepSeek	DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1	DeepSeek-V3: ¥0.14/M token (≈$0.02), R1: ¥0.14/M	DeepSeek-V3: ¥0.28/M token (≈$0.04), R1: ¥0.28/M	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
Qwen (Alibaba)	Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, Qwen3.8-Flash	Qwen3.8-Max: ¥8/M, Qwen3.5-Max: ¥4/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥2/M	Qwen3.8-Max: ¥24/M, Qwen3.5-Max: ¥12/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥6/M	✅ Direct China access (Aliyun Bailian); global via OpenRouter and HuggingFace	1M tokens free credit for new users (90-day validity); Qwen3.5 open weights for self-hosting	View Details →
Exa	Search API (real-time web + token-efficient page contents), Deep Search (multi-step reasoning, structured outputs, citations)	$7 / 1k Search requests (first 10 results; +$1 / 1k extra results; +$1 / 1k AI page summaries)	Deep Search: $12-$15 / 1k requests • Agent: $0.012-$1.00 per fixed-effort run • Contents: $1 / 1k pages • Answer: $5 / 1k • Monitors: $15 / 1k	✅ Hosted SaaS globally accessible; direct mainland-China access may be restricted depending on network egress	$20 in free credits at signup (~2,800 searches) + $10 in free credits every month; no payment method required; free tier includes access to all API endpoints	View Details →
Meituan LongCat	LongCat-2.0 (1.6T MoE), LongCat-2.0 INT4	OpenRouter: $0.60/M token (48B active MoE)	OpenRouter: $2.40/M token (48B active MoE)	✅ OpenRouter / Hugging Face self-host		View Details →
Stepfun	Step-2 (1.2T multimodal flagship, text+image+audio+video, 128K context), Step-2-mini (200B multimodal, faster Step-2 variant)	Step-2: ¥6/M, Step-2-mini: ¥1/M, Step-1: ¥4/M, Step-R: ¥8/M	Step-2: ¥18/M, Step-2-mini: ¥3/M, Step-1: ¥12/M, Step-R: ¥24/M	✅ Direct from China (platform.stepfun.com endpoint, domestic BGP routes)	New accounts receive 1,000,000 free tokens (30-day validity from registration)	View Details →
Alibaba Cloud Bailian	Qwen3.5-Max, Qwen3.5-Plus	Qwen3.5-Max: ¥4/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥2/M, Qwen3.5-72B: ¥4/M, QwQ: ¥2/M	Qwen3.5-Max: ¥12/M, Qwen3.5-Plus: ¥6/M, Qwen3.5-72B: ¥12/M, QwQ: ¥8/M	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
Baidu ERNIE (文心一言)	ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, ERNIE 4.0 Turbo	ERNIE 4.5 Turbo: $0.003/M tokens, ERNIE 4.0 Turbo: $0.012/M	ERNIE 4.5 Turbo: $0.003/M, ERNIE 4.0 Turbo: $0.012/M	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
Moonshot AI Kimi	Kimi K3.1 Pro, Kimi K3.1 Pro Highspeed	K3.1 Pro: $2/M uncached ($0.20 cached); Highspeed $4/M; K3: $3/M ($0.30); K2.7/K2.6: $0.95/M	K3.1 Pro: $10/M; Highspeed $20/M; K3: $15/M; K2.7/K2.6: $4/M	✅ Direct access intended for Mainland China	New-user credit cannot be spent on the K3 series; K3 models unlock after a minimum $1 top-up, with rate-limit tiers set by cumulative recharge	View Details →
Dify	GPT-4o / GPT-4o-mini / o1 / o3 (via OpenAI), Claude 3.5 Sonnet / Haiku / Opus (via Anthropic)	Sandbox free: 200 GPT-4 calls + 5MB vector storage + 10 docs + 5,000 API calls/month; Professional $59/workplace/mo: 100MB vector + 100 docs + 50 workflows	Team $159/workplace/mo: 500MB vector + 500 docs + 200 workflows + 500K trigger events; Enterprise custom (SSO/private deploy/SLA)	✅ Parent company LangGenius is China-based; native Chinese support, Alibaba Cloud one-click deploy, SOC 2/GDPR/ISO 27001 certified, full China availability	Sandbox free tier: 200 GPT-4 calls + 5MB vector storage + 10 docs + 2 workflows + 5,000 API calls/month (30-day logs)	View Details →
Zhipu AI GLM	GLM-5.3, GLM-5.3-Flash	GLM-5.3 (Workers AI): $1.40/M + $0.26/M cached; GLM-5.2: ¥8/M; GLM-5.3-Flash (Workers AI): $0.15/M; GLM-5: ¥4-6/M; GLM-4.7: ¥2-4/M; GLM-4.5-Air: ¥0.8/M; GLM-4.7-Flash: ¥0/M (free)	GLM-5.3 (Workers AI): $4.40/M; GLM-5.2: ¥28/M; GLM-5.3-Flash (Workers AI): $0.50/M; GLM-5: ¥18-22/M; GLM-4.7: ¥8-16/M; GLM-4.5-Air: ¥2-8/M; GLM-4.7-Flash: ¥0/M (free)	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
Cloudflare AI Gateway	通过 Gateway 路由到 20+ Provider 任意模型	免费层: 100万次请求/月；超出 $0.20/100万次 + Provider 自身费用	按请求计费，不按 token 计；Gateway 本身加价 $0.20/100万请求	✅ Global CDN (China edge via partners)		View Details →
Tencent Hunyuan	Hunyuan Hy4 preview, Hunyuan Turbo	Turbo S: ¥0.8/M tokens, Turbo: ¥1.2/M, Lite: ¥0.3/M	Turbo S: ¥0.8/M tokens, Turbo: ¥4.8/M, Lite: ¥0.3/M	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
ByteDance Doubao	Doubao-Seed-2.0 (旗舰推理), Doubao-Seed-2.0-lite (高性价比)	Seed-2.0: ¥0.8/M, Seed-2.0-lite: ¥0.5/M, Seed-2.0-mini: ¥0.15/M	Seed-2.0: ¥2/M, Seed-2.0-lite: ¥1/M, Seed-2.0-mini: ¥0.6/M	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
LiteLLM	通过 Proxy 转发 100+ Provider 任意模型	开源免费自部署；LiteLLM Cloud 按量计费	开源免费自部署；LiteLLM Cloud 按量计费	✅ Open-source self-hosted, no restrictions		View Details →
SiliconFlow	Qwen/Qwen3.5-Plus, Qwen/Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct	¥0.4-2/1M tokens (Qwen2.5-7B ~¥0.4, Llama 3.3 70B ~¥2)	¥0.4-2/1M tokens	✅ Direct access in China	¥1-200 free credits on signup (varies by promo), enough for 1-20M tokens	View Details →
Arize Phoenix	OpenTelemetry 原生 trace collector，支持任意 LLM 框架, Phoenix Cloud 托管 + 自托管 (Apache-2 / Elastic-2.0)	Cloud free tier: 10 GiB storage per workspace; Self-host: $0 (infrastructure only)	Phoenix Cloud paid: pay-as-you-go (storage-based pricing); Arize AX enterprise: custom contract	✅ Open-source self-host + Phoenix Cloud (China SaaS access requires proxy)	Phoenix Cloud free tier: 10 GiB storage per workspace (no time limit)	View Details →
Block AI (b.ai)	GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini	主流模型 + 0-10% 加价（如 GPT-4o $2.5→$2.75/M）	主流模型 + 0-10% 加价	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
Helicone	通过 AI Gateway 代理 100+ Provider 任意模型, AI Gateway + LLM Observability 集成	免费层: 10,000 请求/月 + 1GB 存储；Pro $79/月(团队版含告警、HQL 查询)；Team $799/月(SOC-2/HIPAA)	按月订阅 + 用量计费(超过免费额度)	✅ Open-source self-host + SaaS		View Details →
FreeModel	DeepSeek V3 / R1, Qwen 2.5 / QwQ-32B	Model-dependent (platform markup TBD)	Model-dependent	✅ Available in China	Credits on registration (amount TBD)	View Details →
APIKEY.FUN	GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet	主流模型，价格约为官方 API 的 60-80%	主流模型，价格约为官方 API 的 60-80%	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
01.AI Yi (零一万物)	Yi-Lightning (智能路由 → DeepSeek-V3/Qwen3-30B-A3B/Yi-Lightning), Yi-Vision-v2 (视觉理解，路由 → Qwen2.5-VL-72B/Yi-Vision-V2)	¥0.99/1M total tokens (Yi-Lightning, input+output combined billing)	¥0.99/1M total tokens (combined billing, no input/output distinction)	✅ Direct access in China (Chinese company, supports domestic registration + Alipay/WeChat Pay)	Free rate limit tier on registration (limited RPM/TPM), no free initial credits	View Details →
MiniMax (Hailuo AI)	MiniMax-01 (Lightning / Turbo / Pro), MiniMax-Text-01	MiniMax-01 Lightning: ¥0.2/M tokens, Turbo: ¥0.8/M, Pro: ¥2/M, M3: ¥1.5/M	MiniMax-01 Lightning: ¥0.2/M tokens, Turbo: ¥0.8/M, Pro: ¥2/M, M3: ¥1.5/M	✅ Direct access in China		View Details →
Mem0	OpenAI GPT-4o / GPT-4-Turbo / GPT-3.5, Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet / Haiku / Opus	Hobby free: 10,000 memories + 1,000 retrieval API calls/month; Starter $19/mo: 50,000 memories + 5,000 calls	Pro $249/mo: unlimited memories + 50,000 retrieval API calls + Graph Memory + multi-project; Enterprise contract	✅ Open-source (Apache-2.0, 61k+ stars) + Cloud SaaS; self-host works in China without proxy	Hobby free tier: 10,000 memories + 1,000 retrieval API calls/month (unlimited end users), community support	View Details →
Kling AI (Kuaishou)	Kling 3.0 (native 4K video, multi-shot sequencing, Native Audio), Kling 3.0 Omni (multimodal video, video/image reference input)	Per-second video billing. Kling 3.0 Turbo: 720p $0.112/s, 1080p $0.14/s. Kling 3.0: 720p $0.084-0.126/s, 1080p $0.112-0.168/s (Native Audio), 4K $0.42/s. Kling 3.0 Omni: 720p $0.084-0.126/s, 1080p $0.112-0.168/s, 4K $0.42/s, varies by video/audio input.	Image API: Kling Image 3.0 $0.028/image (1K/2K), 3.0-omni $0.028-0.056/image (up to 4K), Image 2.1 $0.014-0.028/image, Image O1 $0.028/image, Multi-Shot $0.07/call. Video list price 1 Unit = $0.14; image list price 1 Unit = $0.0035.	✅ Official Chinese service available (Kuaishou first-party, mainland cloud nodes available via Kling Open Platform); the global klingai.com developer API can require network setup depending on region	New users get a small one-time free credit grant on the platform to try video/image generation; there is no permanent free API tier — API usage is billed per generated second (video) or per image.	View Details →
Chroma	All-MiniLM-L6-v2 (default, 384-dim, SBERT), All-mpnet-base-v2 (768-dim, higher quality SBERT)	Chroma OSS is fully free (Apache 2.0) for local/embedded; Chroma Cloud Free forever: 50K vectors, 5K queries/mo, 0.5 GB storage; Pro $0.30/M vectors-mo + $0.01/M queries (min $10/mo); Enterprise contract (custom nodes, HIPAA, SOC 2)	Three-dimension billing (storage GB-mo + vector count + query count); no per-embedding API fee; default embedding function runs locally at zero cost; BYO embedding billed by third-party API	✅ Chroma OSS runs fully local (on any server, zero latency); Chroma Cloud on AWS us-east-1 / eu-west-1 / ap-southeast-2 (Singapore node planned H2 2026), ~200-400ms latency from mainland China	Chroma OSS permanently free, Apache 2.0, no feature limits, no vector count cap (limited by local hardware); Chroma Cloud Free forever: 50K vectors + 5K queries/mo + 0.5 GB storage + 1 Collection + community support	View Details →
fal.ai	FLUX.2 Pro (text-to-image, $0.03/MP first MP + $0.015/extra MP), FLUX1.1 [pro] (ultra-fast text-to-image, per-megapixel)	Per-request / per-second billing, no subscription. Image gen: FLUX.2 Pro $0.03/first MP + $0.015/extra MP, FLUX1.1 [pro] per MP, Nano Banana 2 $0.08/image, FLUX.1 [schnell] no price displayed. Video: Kling v3 $0.084-0.168/sec, Seedance 2.0 $0.3034/sec (720p). TTS: routed through ElevenLabs/MiniMax at provider rates. Credit-based: prepay $10+ into credit balance, usage deducted at model-specific rates. Open-source models billed per-second with sub-second granularity.		✅ Available from Mainland China (fal.ai uses global CDN, no proxy needed); latency varies by model inference node, typically 200-500ms	No free API tier (prepay $10+ for credit balance); no monthly fees, no subscriptions, no hidden fees; serverless auto-scales to zero when idle	View Details →
Hume AI	EVI 3 (Empathic Voice Interface 3), OCTAVE TTS (voice design + cloning)	EVI 3: ~$0.096/min (pay-per-second); OCTAVE TTS: $0.048/1K chars; Expression Measurement: $0.0008/sec	Same as input (most endpoints symmetric)	Proxy required (US export controls)	Free credits on signup (amount per account), enough to trial EVI 3	View Details →

Frequently Asked Questions

Which AI API is best for global developers in 2026? ▼

For global developers, OpenAI (GPT-5, o3) and Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.8) remain the safest choices — broadest capability, mature SDKs, strongest tooling. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro is the strongest multimodal alternative. Mistral Large 3 is a strong EU-hosted option. Use the price comparison table below to filter by tier and capability.

Can I use OpenAI or Claude in mainland China? ▼

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and most Western providers require a proxy or VPN when accessed from mainland China. For mainland China users, DeepSeek, Alibaba Bailian (Qwen), Baidu ERNIE, Moonshot Kimi, Zhipu GLM, Tencent Hunyuan, and ByteDance Doubao work without a proxy. The "China Available" column shows status for each provider.

Which AI API is cheapest per token in 2026? ▼

For raw $/1M tokens: Google Gemini 2.5 Flash at $0.30 input / $2.50 output, Mistral Large 3 at $0.50 / $1.50, and Grok 4.5 at $2 / $6 are the lowest among frontier-tier models. For China-direct use, DeepSeek V4 Flash is ¥1-2 / 1M tokens. Use the calculator to model your actual workload.

Which AI API has the best free tier? ▼

Google AI (Gemini 2.0 / 2.5 Flash) offers the most generous free quota. OpenAI Playground gives small credits for evaluation. DeepSeek historically gives a signup bonus for new users. For local/private use, Ollama and Chroma run entirely on your own hardware with no API cost.

📚 Latest Tutorials

In-depth guides and free-tier comparisons updated weekly

View all →

News Analysis July 26, 2026

OpenRouter Classifiers: AI Cost & Usage Tracking

OpenRouter Classifiers auto-tag API calls by department, task type & agent complexity. Track costs, compliance & model usage.

Provider Review July 25, 2026

FriendliAI API Review: Frontier Inference Cloud

FriendliAI review: pay-per-token Model APIs from $0.14/M, dedicated GPU from $2.9/hr. SOC 2, HIPAA, 593K models.

inference frontier models 12 min read

News Analysis July 25, 2026

Claude Opus 5 API: Near-Fable Intelligence at Half Price

Claude Opus 5 ($5/$25 per MTok) nears Fable 5 on CursorBench at half cost. ARC-AGI score 3x next-best. Full pricing, benchmarks & code examples.

pricing benchmarks 14 min read

Comparison July 24, 2026

GPT-5 vs Claude 4 vs Gemini 2026: Price Showdown

GPT-5, Claude 4, Gemini pricing face-off: price per model tier, context windows, features, and migration recommendations.

pricing comparison 8 min read

Provider Review July 24, 2026

Dify 2026: Open-Source LLM App Builder & Platform

Dify (150k GitHub stars) is the open-source LLM app platform. Sandbox free, Professional $59, Team $159. RAG pipeline, visual workflow, 100+ models.

platform open-source 14 min read

Provider Review July 23, 2026

Mem0 2026: AI Agent Memory Layer & API Review

Mem0 is the de-facto AI Agent memory layer (Apache-2.0, 61k stars). Hobby free with 10K memories, Starter $19, Pro $249 with Graph Memory. Compare vs Zep, Letta, Pinecone.

memory agents 12 min read

News Analysis 2026-07-23

OpenRouter Caching + Sticky Routing

OpenRouter prompt caching cuts cached reads to 0.1x input on Anthropic/DeepSeek/Qwen. Sticky routing pins the warm provider. 6-turn agent cost table.

OpenRouter caching sticky routing 11 min read

Provider Review July 22, 2026

Pinecone 2026: Managed Vector Database for RAG

Pinecone is the managed vector database behind Notion AI, Shopify Sidekick, and Cohere's enterprise RAG. Serverless from $50/mo, free $50 Starter credits, SOC-2/HIPAA on Enterprise. Compare vs Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector.

vector 12 min read

Provider Review July 21, 2026

Arize Phoenix 2026: Open-Source LLM Observability

Arize Phoenix (Elastic-2.0, 10.6k stars): open-source LLM observability with OpenTelemetry-native tracing, 17+ LLM frameworks auto-instrumented, free 10 GiB Cloud tier vs Helicone/Langfuse/Portkey.

OpenTelemetry Elastic-2.0 Self-Hostable

News Analysis July 21, 2026

Qwen3.8 vs Kimi K3: 2T+ Open Models API 2026

Qwen3.8-Max-Preview (Alibaba Token Plan) vs Kimi K3 (Moonshot, 2.8T, 1M context): vision, tools, pricing. Verified API access and cost breakdown.

News Analysis July 23, 2026

Kimi K3: Moonshot's Open-Source 3T Flagship Explained

Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter open-source flagship with 1M context, native vision, Claude Code integration. Weights drop July 27. Pricing, API, benchmarks.

2.8T params 1M context Open-source Claude Code

Provider Review July 20, 2026

Vercel AI Gateway 2026: Zero-Markup AI Routing

$5/mo free credits, zero token markup (incl. BYOK), AI SDK v5/v6 native. Pricing vs OpenRouter, Cloudflare, Portkey, LiteLLM, Helicone.

Provider Guide July 20, 2026

Qwen3.5 API 2026: Aliyun Bailian vs Open Weights

Qwen3.5 + Aliyun Bailian API guide 2026: pricing, access paths, open weights vs hosted, vs Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4.

Provider Review July 19, 2026

RunPod 2026: Per-Second GPU Cloud Pricing

Per-GPU-second billing from $0.69 RTX 4090 to $7.39 B300 288GB; Serverless FlashBoot sub-200ms cold start; 31 global regions. Pricing vs Modal, Baseten, Replicate.

Provider Review July 18, 2026

Helicone 2026: Open-Source LLM Observability

Apache-2.0 open-source LLM observability platform (5.9k GitHub stars). AI Gateway, HQL query language, SOC-2/HIPAA. Pricing from $79/mo vs Portkey/LiteLLM.

🦀

News Analysis

Claude Code Migration: Bun→Rust in 11 Days

Anthropic used Claude Code to migrate Bun from Zig to Rust: 1M lines, 100% test pass, $165k API bill. Cost math, prompt caching, parallel agents.

Read analysis →

🌙

Kimi K3 API Review 2026: 1M Context & Pricing

Official Kimi K3 pricing, 1M context, native vision, tools, caching, OpenAI-compatible code, and the lower-cost K2.7 Code / K2.6 alternatives.

Read review →

🎙️

AssemblyAI API Review 2026: Universal-3.5 Pro ASR

Universal-3.5 Pro at $0.21/hr, Universal-2 at $0.15/hr. 185 hr/mo free pre-recorded + 333 hr/mo streaming. Speaker diarization, voice agents vs Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia.

Read review →

🤝

Together AI API Review 2026: 200+ Open Models

200+ open models at $0.03/M tokens, FlashAttention-4 inference, OpenAI-compatible API, GPU clusters.

Read review →

🐉

Tencent Hunyuan Hy3: Free on OpenRouter (Until 7-21)

Hy3 295B MoE (21B active) is free on OpenRouter until 2026-07-21. Verified pricing, 256K context, vs DeepSeek-V4 Flash, rollout playbook.

July 14, 2026 · 16 min

⚡

Modal API 2026: Serverless GPU Cloud

Modal review: Python-native serverless GPU cloud, per-GPU-second billing, vLLM/SGLang deploy, $30/mo free credits. Pricing vs Baseten, Replicate.

July 13, 2026 · 14 min

🛡️

News Analysis

GPT-Red 2026: OpenAI API Security Guide

OpenAI GPT-Red is an internal automated red team, not a public API. Learn what its 84% attack result means for prompt injection and agent security.

Read analysis →

🚀