Chinese AI models are 10-50x cheaper and closing the quality gap fast.

DeepSeek V3.2 rivals GPT-4o at $0.28/M input. Qwen3.5-Plus gives you 1M context for $0.11/M. But the docs are in Chinese, some need a Chinese phone number, and content gets filtered. We sort through all of it so you don't have to.

Why developers are switching

10-50x
cheaper than GPT-4o / Claude Sonnet on input tokens
61%
of OpenRouter tokens now go to Chinese models
OpenAI-compatible
drop-in replacement — change the base URL and you're done

All Models at a Glance

Sorted by provider. Prices are per 1M tokens in USD.

Model Provider Input Output Context Type Access
DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek $0.28 $0.42 128K chat Direct
DeepSeek V3.2 (Thinking) DeepSeek $0.28 $0.42 128K reasoning Direct
DeepSeek V3.2 Speciale DeepSeek $0.4 $1.2 164K reasoning Direct
DeepSeek R1 DeepSeek $0.55 $2.19 131K reasoning Direct
DeepSeek R1 0528 DeepSeek $0.45 $2.15 131K reasoning Direct
DeepSeek Prover V2 DeepSeek $0.5 $2.18 164K reasoning Direct
Qwen3.5-Plus Alibaba Cloud / Qwen $0.11 $0.66 1000K chat Direct
Qwen3.5-Flash Alibaba Cloud / Qwen $0.028 $0.275 1000K chat Direct
Qwen3-Max Alibaba Cloud / Qwen $0.34 $1.37 262K chat Direct
Qwen3-Plus Alibaba Cloud / Qwen $0.07 $0.28 131K chat Direct
Qwen3-Turbo Alibaba Cloud / Qwen $0.007 $0.028 131K chat Direct
Qwen3 VL 235B Alibaba Cloud / Qwen $0.26 $0.9 131K vision Direct
Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI $0.6 $2.5 256K chat Direct
Kimi K2 Moonshot AI $0.6 $2.5 256K chat Direct
Kimi K2 Thinking Moonshot AI $0.47 $2 256K reasoning Direct
GLM-5 Zhipu AI $1 $3.2 205K chat Direct
GLM-4.7 Zhipu AI $0.6 $2.2 128K chat Direct
GLM-4.7-Flash Zhipu AI Free Free 128K free Direct
ERNIE 4.5 Baidu $0.55 $2.2 128K chat Limited
ERNIE 4.5 Turbo Baidu $0.11 $0.44 128K chat Limited
ERNIE X1 Baidu $0.28 $1.1 reasoning Limited
MiniMax M2.5 MiniMax $0.3 $1.2 205K chat Direct
ERNIE 5.0 Baidu $0.83 $3.31 128K chat Limited
GLM-5-Code Zhipu AI $1.2 $5 coding Direct
Step 3.5 Flash StepFun $0.1 $0.3 262K chat Direct
Doubao Seed 2.0 Pro ByteDance $0.47 $2.37 512K reasoning Limited
Doubao Seed 2.0 Lite ByteDance $0.09 $0.53 256K chat Limited
Doubao Seed 2.0 Mini ByteDance $0.03 $0.31 chat Limited
ERNIE X1 Turbo Baidu $0.14 $0.55 reasoning Limited
Hunyuan A13B Tencent $0.14 $0.57 131K chat Direct

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