Consumer Reports for the AI API gray market

What it does This repository is a running consumer guide to AI API relay stations—middlemen that resell access to Western models like GPT-5.5, Claude Opus, and Gemini to users in China who face billing, geographic, or account-ban hurdles. The maintainer catalogs per-million-token pricing, stability, model coverage, and red flags for roughly a dozen providers, updating the list as rates and service quality shift.

The interesting bit The author applies a surprisingly rigorous audit lens to an informal market: checking whether vendors secretly substitute cheap domestic models (e.g., GLM) for premium APIs, verifying cache-hit pricing (flagging brokers that charge 30 % instead of the standard ~10 %), and warning that any reseller can abscond with deposits. A companion site, hvoy.ai, now tracks real-time rankings and port monitoring, though the detection code itself is no longer open source.

Key highlights

• Evaluates 15+ relay providers on stability, latency, model breadth, and RMB-per-million-token rates
• Flags specific scams: model substitution, opaque billing, inflated cache pricing, and “run away” risk
• Recommends micro-payments over bulk deposits because the industry is volatile
• Includes a DIY escape hatch—buying Turkey-region GPT Plus via gift cards—for users who want to skip middlemen entirely
• Maintains a neutral/mediocre tier for vendors that are usable but unremarkable

Caveats

• This is a curated markdown list with affiliate links, not a runnable tool, library, or API
• Pricing and service quality change quickly; the author explicitly notes that keeping data accurate is difficult
• Several assessments lean on subjective taste (“interface style I like”) and anecdotal community reports rather than reproducible benchmarks

Verdict Chinese developers who need reliable, cost-effective access to Western AI APIs—and want to avoid depositing money into a reseller that might vanish overnight—will find this a pragmatic, battle-tested field guide. If you are not navigating this specific market, there is nothing here to use.