[WhyNotHugo]

Pricing is actually far cheaper than that. There's two tiers of pricing: Chinese and US.

If you sign up with non-Chinese phone number, you're bucketed into US, you get US prices, can pay only in USD and with American credit card network.

Chinese prices are about 9x cheaper than the US prices, which are already far cheaper than Claude or other American provider. If you can somehow get hold of a Chinese phone number, keep in mind that you can save ~90% of the bill.

[wolttam]

It’s 100 yuan per million output tokens in China. That’s $14.7 USD - not “far cheaper”.

[osti]

He's talking about the plans, you are talking about API prices.

[vineyardmike]

Most of this hand-wringing on price will go away.

My assumption is that Anthropic, OpenAI, Kimi, etc all have a similar cost structure when serving models. The same size model roughly generates the same GPU usage whether you’re American or Chinese. I’d also guess that the model sizes across all SOTA models is similar, we just only see data for open models. The difference is most likely that American companies simply charge more because they have the dominant market position.

Remember not too long ago when Anthropic was charging $75/mt for Opus? Now that many models are in “opus tier”, their pricing is $25 - higher than competitors but close. The newest Kimi is $15. 40% lower to forgo “made in America” with American enterprise support staff is not crazy. Compare AWS to Hetzner or any other flagship enterprise service to the foreign and discount option. I assume that over time, we’ll see the commodification of models reducing prices even towards the raw GPU costs.

[ozozozd]

It’s about the cost of energy. And China has cheap, clean energy.

The calculation is about tokens/gigawatt and $/gigawatt.