OpenAI and Anthropic are subsidizing the subscriptions themselves, as price discrimination (enterprise customers will pay the full API price, but they also want to capture the individual subscription market). This also incentivizes people to use Codex / Claude Code rather than competitors like Cursor. Not sure about the other subsidized channels.
It’s a really substantial discount, probably over 10x if you fully use the weekly allowance of a Max 20x subscription.
I’m also guessing that like a gym membership, many of the subscriptions are under-used in practice. As someone whose work and hobbies don’t involve significant programming, I have a Claude Max subscription but I only come close to limits very rarely (the only times in recent memory was when I tried to use Fable on Max to do a sweep of questions that interested me and barely seemed on the cusp of doable with present-day AI, in the 3 days I had access to Fable[1]).
I got blocked/filtered a bunch of times on work-relevant tasks but I wanted to see if it had novel literary insights on Chiang, Kafka, etc. Burned a bunch of tokens on this.
Agree. I expect them to be more fully used in the future. As inference scaling improves, it means there will be more tasks that can be done with 100% of token limits but not 10% of token limits. Companies will probably adjust pricing strategy in response.
Hi! Your question relayes to the several ways for relay operators are incentivized to operate in 2026 that I understand.
On one hand, efficiently routing and utilizing each Claude 5x or 20x sub means gaining access to around $4000 worth of tokens with just $200 a month of subscription. OpenAI subsidizes it even more aggressively, reaching more than $5000. However, the cost of being banned is also high (partially due to surveillance built into Claude Code which flags the most popular third party relays). Some relay operators may open-source parts of their routing code on Github (on top of using open source relay builders like NewAPI) to serve enterprises that have privacy requirements. Many have even implemented OpenRouter-esque data protection and personal information redaction features for orgs to choose to implement for their employees.
But on the other hand, many programmers may not want to put money into services that might get shut down at any time; this is where “公益站” (free relays) come into play. These are typically advertised in tech forums, and are primarily focused on collecting out-of-distribution data to be distilled into models. That’s what I mean by a “gentleman’s handshake data collection method between relay operators”—the user implicitly understand that their data is being used for distillation purposes, and understands the risk well enough to justify using it in certain contexts.
Why are the tokens so cheap in China? Who is subsidizing this and why?
What does “gentleman’s handshake data collection method between relay operators” mean?
OpenAI and Anthropic are subsidizing the subscriptions themselves, as price discrimination (enterprise customers will pay the full API price, but they also want to capture the individual subscription market). This also incentivizes people to use Codex / Claude Code rather than competitors like Cursor. Not sure about the other subsidized channels.
It’s a really substantial discount, probably over 10x if you fully use the weekly allowance of a Max 20x subscription.
I’m also guessing that like a gym membership, many of the subscriptions are under-used in practice. As someone whose work and hobbies don’t involve significant programming, I have a Claude Max subscription but I only come close to limits very rarely (the only times in recent memory was when I tried to use Fable on Max to do a sweep of questions that interested me and barely seemed on the cusp of doable with present-day AI, in the 3 days I had access to Fable[1]).
I got blocked/filtered a bunch of times on work-relevant tasks but I wanted to see if it had novel literary insights on Chiang, Kafka, etc. Burned a bunch of tokens on this.
Agree. I expect them to be more fully used in the future. As inference scaling improves, it means there will be more tasks that can be done with 100% of token limits but not 10% of token limits. Companies will probably adjust pricing strategy in response.
Hi! Your question relayes to the several ways for relay operators are incentivized to operate in 2026 that I understand.
On one hand, efficiently routing and utilizing each Claude 5x or 20x sub means gaining access to around $4000 worth of tokens with just $200 a month of subscription. OpenAI subsidizes it even more aggressively, reaching more than $5000. However, the cost of being banned is also high (partially due to surveillance built into Claude Code which flags the most popular third party relays). Some relay operators may open-source parts of their routing code on Github (on top of using open source relay builders like NewAPI) to serve enterprises that have privacy requirements. Many have even implemented OpenRouter-esque data protection and personal information redaction features for orgs to choose to implement for their employees.
But on the other hand, many programmers may not want to put money into services that might get shut down at any time; this is where “公益站” (free relays) come into play. These are typically advertised in tech forums, and are primarily focused on collecting out-of-distribution data to be distilled into models. That’s what I mean by a “gentleman’s handshake data collection method between relay operators”—the user implicitly understand that their data is being used for distillation purposes, and understands the risk well enough to justify using it in certain contexts.