I spent $47 testing 4 AI models last month. Here's what I learned.

I spent $47 testing 4 AI models last month. Here's what I learned.

Not about the models. About the workflow.

The setup

Same prompt. Same temperature (0.3). Same max_tokens (500).
Four different models through the same endpoint.

Model	Avg Latency	Cost/1M tokens	Best for
deepseek-chat	1.2s	$0.27	General purpose, fastest
qwen-max	0.8s	$2.80	Multilingual, structured output
glm-4-plus	1.5s	$7.10	Complex Chinese reasoning
moonshot-v1-32k	1.0s	$12.00	Long context summarization

Notice something? The cheapest model is also the fastest.
And the most expensive isn't always the best — it depends on
what you're asking.

The discovery that made me angry

I was using 4 different API keys. Four pip install commands.
Four different create() signatures. Four dashboards to check
at the end of the month.

Then I realized: they're all OpenAI-compatible.

All of them. Every single one.

So I swapped 4 base_url strings for 1. I changed nothing else.
Same openai library. Same code. Same response parsing.

client = openai.OpenAI(
api_key="mb-xxx",
base_url="https://aibridge-api.com/v1"
)

DeepSeek
client.chat.completions.create(model="deepseek-chat", messages=msgs)

Qwen — literally the same call
client.chat.completions.create(model="qwen-max", messages=msgs)

What I actually gained

Not just cleaner code. Three things I didn't expect:

1. Free exploration. The free tier (500K tokens/month) means I
   can test models without committing to a paid account.

2. Model routing. My app now picks the model based on the task
   at runtime — cheap model for summarization, powerful model for
   reasoning. One endpoint makes this trivial.

3. One bill. I don't log into 4 dashboards anymore. I don't
   worry about 4 separate rate limits. I don't get 4 emails when
   my card expires.

The rule I follow now

If you're building anything that calls an AI model, abstract the
provider layer on day one. Not day 30 when DeepSeek rate-limits
you and you're scrambling to wire up Qwen before users notice.

The abstraction pays for itself the first time you switch.

→ aibridge-api.com — 14 models, one endpoint, free to start.