8/16/2026 at 3:42:33 PM
The original article linked in the opening has more context https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-marketPeople trading their unused credits feels more genuine, although still in violation of the agreements. The person who got into YC Startup School who was trying to resell the $2500 of credits was interesting. It wouldn’t be that hard for OpenAI to identify the IP addresses of the relays and start flagging accounts, tracing it back to the source. Risking burning your bridges with YC for a relatively small profit is a questionable decision.
The original article showed discounts ranging all the way up to 98%. At those levels it’s obviously not people reselling anything. It’s either sourced from stolen API keys, bought with stolen credit cards, or acquired through automated sign up of trial accounts if you’re actually getting the API you request.
I would expect a lot of them are reselling a different API. Sign up for Anthropic tokens and get Deepseek responses instead.
by Aurornis
8/16/2026 at 5:15:19 PM
Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend.But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.
by judge2020
8/16/2026 at 5:34:40 PM
It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside
by ffsm8
8/16/2026 at 7:06:06 PM
Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense.YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers.
It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).
by drawnwren
8/16/2026 at 7:07:54 PM
Chinese prices aren't really OOM cheaper. Deepseek recently did a big price hike too.by bonoboTP
8/16/2026 at 8:33:41 PM
The one thing I trust is that Chinese prices aren't overinflated. They're almost certainly closer to the actual cost of inference + training amortization than what Western labs are offering.DeepSeek's price hike is mostly driven by increased demand, for example. It's not about losses so much as they don't have enough infrastructure and need to reduce demand somehow.
by ronsor
8/16/2026 at 9:55:17 PM
Why do you have this trust? Are they not profit oriented? Or you suspect that Xi's policy push is to undercut American AI?by bonoboTP
8/16/2026 at 11:57:39 PM
Are you familiar with Chinas version of capitalism? It is markedly different than “the” western modelby pyvpx
8/17/2026 at 5:42:14 AM
I am not, but would be interested to hear. Any articles?by Filligree
8/17/2026 at 12:19:25 PM
"Overcapacity and low profitability" [1] is how I understand the difference, i.e. different competitive ecosystem from a different policy and intervention style.https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/IE-PROD/PDFVIEWER.calias?pdf...
by al_hag
8/17/2026 at 12:36:33 PM
There's no English-language article that can fully capture the system because it's a moving target to begin with, and anything official is vague on purpose (to be fair, much of the legislation in the US is too, except the Constitutional backstop and co-equal judiciary does not exist in China). The official messaging is always targeted and curated with a specific audience in mind and how much truth is contained within varies. The best way to describe it without turning it into an essay is that it's "aspirationally market-driven" system that is not defined by a fixed and consistent ideology but rather the constraints of the capacity of the administrative state to control the parts of the economy that is legible to the state. It's not a free market except for the black market, but the black market is frankly huge if nothing else to compensate for the state asserting not just a monopoly on the use of violence but also the monopolistic determinator of morality, which the people are less willing to buy into, but that disconnection itself creates an opportunity for arbitrage. That is the relationship dynamic that have retained some degree of stability, but everything else is effectively subject to change on a dime without notice. The party will never accept openly that it is capitalistic and in some sense that's not even a lie, but what the state is able to impose and what the people actually do are very different things. As the state excludes 99% of the population writ large from politics, full stop (you are either born into it, or you're not eligible to participate, with some narrow exceptions that occasionally pop up), there's not much of a ground-level appetite for dogma and doctrines. Instead you end up with a pragmatic, descriptive market that exists differently within and without, and just like the socialism label being basically symbolic, same goes for capitalism.People have been talking about late capitalism in the west for a century. The Chinese state would argue that we cannot be in late capitalism because we're actually in the first stage of socialism, and the people would wonder how we got to late capitalism when they never got to experience early or middle capitalism. But really the only thing we know that definitively does not work is implenting Marxism and Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and its offshoots as doctrine. Whether that means that the default is a prescriptive version of capitalism is, well, open to debate, and probably too simplistic.
by jimz
8/17/2026 at 9:08:09 AM
There is no "Chinese capitalism" or "Western capitalism" - capitalism is applied thermodynamics, once you remove the limiting factors (both material and political), it's the same everywhere.Like the 10th Rule of Acquisition says, greed is eternal. Structures and behaviors that flow down from this tend to be the same everywhere.
by TeMPOraL
8/17/2026 at 10:24:02 AM
Once you remove the limiting factors, which is what makes the capitalism be "chinese" or "western".by JuanFAngel
8/17/2026 at 10:49:42 AM
The problem with this reading is that Western capitalism has been effectively removing the thermodynamics analogy through monopolism, conglomeration, regulatory capture, etc.by robhaswell
8/17/2026 at 5:00:11 AM
I don't think DeepSeek's price increase has to do with increased demand, but rather increased investment. I think they increased their capacity and want to make the money back.by LoganDark
8/16/2026 at 7:11:42 PM
Fair, I hadn't looked recently. It looks like currently kimi is either 1/2 or 1/4 Ant pricing depending on whether you think Opus 5 is usable or not. (Deepseek is still an OOM though)by drawnwren
8/17/2026 at 6:41:11 AM
My pet theory is that the PRC is heavily subsidizing the hosted inferencing costs in order to capture valuable training data, token usage patterns and the occasional leak of valuable data.Given their past history and current geopolitics, I'd be willing to bet this is more likely than not.
by smivan
8/16/2026 at 6:56:35 PM
Costs also have to include the amortized training costs.But the API price is likely simply regular supply and demand, charging as much as the market will pay. Corporations are dropping insane amounts because it's still peanuts for many industries. Software has just been ridiculously cheap before AI. So high prices are still low for companies if it eases some bottlenecks.
by bonoboTP
8/16/2026 at 8:26:34 PM
The costs only have to include amortized training costs if you are trying to be profitable overall. Having positive unit economics and VC subsidized fixed costs is pretty standard.by HWR_14
8/16/2026 at 10:25:13 PM
What happens when the VCs decide to stop dumping more money onto the fire?by Geezus_42
8/16/2026 at 10:28:48 PM
Positive unit economics means that inference as a business continues regardless. The VC's no longer dumping money in means no more training new models.by HWR_14
8/16/2026 at 11:40:22 PM
Not if there is competition who does train newer and better models.by bonoboTP
8/17/2026 at 1:49:39 AM
By lighting VC (public soon) money on fire...by jfaat
8/17/2026 at 10:26:49 AM
So then the entire industry stagnates and most of the companies go bankrupt because they are all selling hype about what models "will" do in the future, not what they do not, and what they do WELL now is very limited.by Geezus_42
8/17/2026 at 2:32:07 AM
this would never work if the core business model requires your flagship product to be best-in-class.by byzantinegene
8/17/2026 at 5:38:14 AM
> It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.Define cost: Is it only the inference cost to the provider, or do you also consider training costs as well?
If it's the latter, how would you estimate the number of total tokens that will be sold for the current model (so that we can calculate marginal cost)?
by selcuka
8/16/2026 at 10:43:42 PM
“It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.”There is no “real cost” other than the cost actually charged.
by dragonwriter
8/16/2026 at 6:33:39 PM
Open weight SOTA models are not greatly cheaper than Anthropic and providers don't have to cover training capex.by HeatrayEnjoyer
8/17/2026 at 6:08:38 AM
> and providers don't have to cover training capex.How so?
by ElFitz
8/17/2026 at 9:14:05 AM
Providers like Fireworks offer inference, they're not training their own models. Yet training is the most expensive part, inference is easy profit.by HeatrayEnjoyer
8/17/2026 at 9:05:37 PM
And even the ones who trained it can’t afford to offer it at a price covering their training capex, since any good open-source model will see other providers selling inference without any training expenses to cover.Didn’t see it, but it’s obvious in retrospect. Thanks!
by ElFitz
8/17/2026 at 9:12:07 AM
With an open-weights model, anyone with the hardware to run the model can act as a provider. The median provider pays nothing for the model, so they do not contribute to the cost of training it.by sethaurus
8/17/2026 at 9:04:10 PM
Ah! Makes sense. Thanks!by ElFitz
8/17/2026 at 12:36:31 AM
> Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend.this is all it is. it's not complicated.
by doctorpangloss
8/17/2026 at 11:44:58 AM
With Claude Max, you have restricted token consumption per timespan (rolling time window measures token consumption in last 5 hrs, will suspend your account if you are above usage). API doesn't have that limitation unless you run out of credit.by ai_prodman_at
8/17/2026 at 5:40:25 AM
Some sellers sell the token twice. Once to the buyer and once more as training data to labs building models.by wodenokoto
8/17/2026 at 12:02:07 AM
Except for the cases of credit card fraud, I don't see what's morally wrong with it, for it to be called "fraud".It's just reselling.
Maybe people are starting to copy Anthropic's rhetoric of "everything that inconveniences me is fraud (e.g. distillation). Everything that benefits me is legit."
by diego_sandoval
8/17/2026 at 2:19:30 AM
> Except for the cases of credit card fraud, I don't see what's morally wrong with it, for it to be called "fraud".Signing up to the startup credit programs with fake startups is fraud.
In general, performing a misrepresentation to deceive another party for financial gain is fraud. So there are plenty of ways to define this as fraud
by Aurornis
8/17/2026 at 3:59:32 PM
If you sign a contract on paper, I 100% agree. It's fraud.Signing up for it on a website and checking a box that says "I agree to the terms of service", I don't think carries the same weight. But maybe that's just me.
by diego_sandoval
8/17/2026 at 12:13:24 AM
Lying to someone to deceive them into providing you with an economic benefit that they otherwise wouldn’t is textbook fraud.by joshuacc