Disclosure: I run ZeroShell, the relay used in this article. Everything below — prices, model lists, the group pitfall — is verifiable on the public pages linked at the end.
Most developers I know keep three or four separate API accounts: one for Claude, one for GPT, one for Gemini, plus a DeepSeek key for cheap experiments. Four balances, four dashboards, four chances to run dry mid-task.
A relay endpoint collapses that into one account. This is the setup I give people who ask, including the one mistake that wastes everyone's first ten minutes.
The endpoint
ZeroShell is an OpenAI-compatible relay:
- Base URL:
https://zeroshell.top/v1 - Anthropic-compatible base:
https://zeroshell.top(native/v1/messages) - 46 models across Claude, GPT-5, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Kimi, Qwen, and GLM families, all on one balance.
The pitfall: model catalogs are per-group
This is the part that bites. On ZeroShell, API keys belong to a group, and each group sees a different model catalog:
- The budget group sees 27 models: DeepSeek, GLM, GPT, Grok, Kimi, Qwen — no Claude.
- The official and stable groups carry the Claude lineup (22 models in the official group).
If you create a budget-group key and ask for claude-sonnet-4-6, you'll get a "model not found" error that looks exactly like a typo. It isn't. Check which group your key is in before you debug anything else.
What it costs
All prices are public (no login needed) and listed per million tokens. A few current examples:
| Model | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| gpt-5.6-luna | ¥0.075 | — |
| gpt-5.6-sol | ¥0.375 | ¥2.25 |
| claude-sonnet-4-6 | ¥2.025 | ¥10.125 |
| gemini-3.1-pro-preview | ¥0.75 | ¥4.5 |
Top-ups are 1:1 — ¥1 buys $1 of quota — with a ¥1 minimum. New accounts get ¥1 of credit after email verification, and an invite link gives ¥1 to both sides, so you can verify your whole toolchain before spending anything.
Two honest caveats:
- Top-ups are Alipay-only right now. If you can't use Alipay, this station isn't practical for you yet.
- Relay ≠ official. You're trusting an operator with routing and billing. Judge any relay — this one included — by whether prices are public, whether you can start with a tiny top-up, and whether the models behave like the real thing on your own test prompts.
Point your tools at it
Cursor — Settings → Models: add your ZeroShell key as the OpenAI API key and override the OpenAI base URL with https://zeroshell.top/v1. Pick a model your key's group actually contains (see the pitfall above).
ChatBox / any OpenAI-compatible client — choose the OpenAI API provider, set the API host to https://zeroshell.top, path /v1, and paste your key.
Claude Code — create an official-group (or stable-group) key, then set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://zeroshell.top and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to your key. Claude models answer over the native Messages API, so Claude Code works unmodified. I run my own local Claude Code through this exact setup.
Verify before you commit
The workflow I'd recommend with any relay:
- Sign up, take the free ¥1 credit.
- Run three prompts you know well — one reasoning, one coding, one long-context — and compare against what you expect from the genuine model.
- Top up the minimum (¥1) only after the outputs check out.
If a relay is going to water models down or disappear, small tests and small top-ups are how you find out cheaply.
Links: zeroshell.top · public pricing at zeroshell.top/pricing · questions: support@zeroshell.top
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