The Real Cost of AI APIs in 2026
Here is how Token China stacks up against the biggest names in AI — by price per 1 million tokens (input/output):
Price Comparison Table
| Provider | Model | Input | Output | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Token China | deepseek-v4-flash | ~$0.014 | ~$0.028 | Fast, cheap daily use |
| Token China | deepseek-v4-pro | ~$0.25 | ~$0.50 | Complex reasoning, coding |
| Token China | glm-5.1 | ~$0.07 | ~$0.14 | Strong Chinese, tool calling |
| Token China | glm-5v-turbo | ~$0.10 | ~$0.20 | Vision, OCR, image analysis |
| OpenAI | GPT-4.1 | $2.00 | $8.00 | General reasoning |
| OpenAI | GPT-4.1-mini | $0.40 | $1.60 | Lightweight tasks |
| Anthropic | Claude Sonnet 4 | $3.00 | $15.00 | Long context work |
| Anthropic | Claude Haiku 4.5 | $0.80 | $4.00 | Fast chat |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | $1.25 | $10.00 | Multimodal | |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | $0.15 | $0.60 | Speed-first | |
| DeepSeek | V3 Official | $0.27 | $1.10 | General purpose |
| DeepSeek | R1 Official | $0.55 | $2.19 | Deep reasoning |
Key Takeaways
DeepSeek V4 Flash at ~$0.014/1M input is 28x cheaper than GPT-4.1-mini and 10x cheaper than Gemini 2.5 Flash.
No phone verification required. No KYC. One API key for all four models.
OpenAI-compatible. Just change base_url to https://token-china.cc/v1. Your existing code works unchanged.
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key="sk-your-key",
base_url="https://token-china.cc/v1"
)
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