Methodology: sources, blended price & China usability

1. Sources

Every price carries a source_url and verified_at. Channels: Official CN (provider's China site, CNY), Official Intl (USD), OpenRouter (public API), Relay (third-party resellers, not yet listed).

Collection: static HTML for OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek; headless Chrome for Google, xAI, Alibaba Model Studio, Kimi, Zhipu, MiniMax, Baidu Qianfan, Tencent Hunyuan and Volcengine Ark; the public API for OpenRouter. Official prices are cross-checked against models.dev open data; a gap above 15% is flagged as “differs”, and the official page always wins.

2. Blended price

Blended = 0.75 × input + 0.25 × output per 1M tokens, compared in USD. CNY is converted at 1 USD = 6.6985 CNY (open.er-api.com, refreshed daily). For tiered pricing we use the lowest tier and note the others.

OpenRouter basis: a model on OpenRouter is often served by several hosts at different prices and precisions (e.g. fp8 or fp4 quantization). We read prices from OpenRouter’s endpoints API, using only standard-tier (not flex or priority) endpoints in healthy status. ① We use the original vendor’s endpoint, i.e. the host is the model author itself (Moonshot AI for Kimi, Z.AI for GLM, DeepSeek for DeepSeek); if the vendor uses time-of-day pricing we take the peak price. Licensed clouds such as Azure, Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex are not the original vendor and are listed separately as a “licensed cloud alternative”. ② If the original vendor does not serve the model on OpenRouter, we use the cheapest non-4-bit third-party endpoint and label it “Third-party host”. ③ Cheaper quantized endpoints (fp4 etc.) are never the main price; they are shown in small text as “Quantized min”. This basis applies from 2026-10-17; price changes it caused are logged as “Methodology change”, not as provider price changes.

Discount basis: if the provider labels a discount as permanent (e.g. MiniMax-M3 “permanent 50% off”), the main price is the discounted price and the list price goes in the notes. For time-limited discounts (e.g. Qwen “limited-time 20% off”, GLM-5.3-Flash “limited-time 50% off”), the main price is the list price; the discounted price and its end date go in the notes, or the notes say “no end date stated” if the official page gives none.

Retired / deprecated names: when the provider's official docs say a model name is retired (e.g. the old name still works but is served and billed as a newer model), or deprecated with a shutdown date, we label the name “Retired” or “Deprecated” with the official source and check time; if only OpenRouter lists an expiration_date and there is no vendor notice, we only say “OpenRouter lists expiration on ”, never that the vendor retires it. Its price rows stay visible, but it is excluded from every “cheapest” ranking: the home table's default first place, the cheapest list, the China-usable list, and the “cheapest” conclusions on hub and provider pages. In prices.json see retired / retired_status / retired_note / retired_source_url / retired_verified_at.

3. Freshness

Rows not re-verified for 14 days are greyed out. Prices without a trustworthy source are never shown.

4. China usability (4 icons)

Direct access: ✗ if the official supported-regions list excludes mainland China, ✓ if the provider runs a mainland ICP-licensed service. Alipay: ✓ when the official docs say Alipay is accepted. Real-name: ✓ when the official docs require ID verification. Overseas card: ✗ when domestic payment is officially accepted. Conditions are verified per channel (official CN, official intl, OpenRouter); unverified conditions are shown as “?·unverified” and never satisfy filters.

OpenRouter mainland direct-access test

On 2026-10-17 10:39 (UTC+8) from Shanghai China Unicom broadband (IPv4 and IPv6, proxy bypassed, Cloudflare trace loc=CN): openrouter.ai 200, /api/v1/models 200, /api/v1/chat/completions without a key 401 (reachable, auth required). This only shows that OpenRouter’s site and API are reachable from the mainland; whether a given model can be used through OpenRouter also depends on its provider. The official supported-regions lists of Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT) and the Google Gemini API do not include mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini API, checked 2026-10-17 11:29 UTC+8), and OpenRouter Terms §5.7 bar users in a provider’s restricted regions from accessing such Restricted Models via OpenRouter. So “Direct in CN” is ✗ for these three providers’ models on OpenRouter; for other providers (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, xAI, Mistral…) we found no explicit official statement, so the tested ✓ is kept and the region restriction is noted as “?”. Only one ISP and location were tested; other ISPs (China Telecom, China Mobile) were not, and conditions may change.

5. Deals

Each deal is labelled official, x_post (an X post from the relevant official account), or community (unconfirmed, labelled as such). Deals past their end date are marked expired automatically.

6. Corrections

Email data@apiprice.app with an official link.