The definitive guide to accessing DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Doubao, MiniMax. No Chinese phone number. No VPN. Pay in USD or WeChat Pay.
Start free — 50 callsChinese models match or beat GPT-4o on many benchmarks at 5-10x lower cost. Developers who switched save 80%+.
GLM-4 Flash at $0.01/M. DeepSeek V3 at $0.34/M (vs GPT-5.4 at $3.25/M). Same or better quality for most tasks.
DeepSeek R1 beats GPT-4o on MATH-500 (97% vs 94%). GLM-5.1 beats Claude Sonnet on HumanEval. Qwen dominates multilingual.
If you serve Chinese customers or work with Chinese content, these models understand the language and culture deeply.
Best overall value. Rivals GPT-4o quality.
$0.34/$0.50
per M tokens
deepseek/deepseek-chat
SOTA reasoning. Dominates MATH/AIME benchmarks.
$0.34/$0.50
per M tokens
deepseek/deepseek-reasoner
Best Chinese-English bilingual. Flagship quality.
$0.13/$1.87
per M tokens
qwen/qwen-plus
Ultra-cheap. Fast for high-volume tasks.
$0.08/$0.31
per M tokens
qwen/qwen-turbo
Coding SOTA. Beats Claude Sonnet on HumanEval.
$1.20/$3.84
per M tokens
zhipu/glm-5.1
Nearly free. Perfect for classification, extraction.
$0.01/$0.01
per M tokens
zhipu/glm-4-flash
Agentic tasks with 256K context.
$0.24/$1.20
per M tokens
moonshot/kimi-k2.5
Budget option for short tasks.
$0.14/$0.14
per M tokens
moonshot/moonshot-v1-8k
Cheapest 256K context model in the market.
$0.06/$0.11
per M tokens
doubao/doubao-pro-256k
1M token context at affordable pricing.
$0.36/$1.44
per M tokens
minimax/minimax-text-01
Direct access to Chinese AI models typically requires:
With AIPower:
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://api.aipower.me/v1",
api_key="YOUR_AIPOWER_KEY",
)
# DeepSeek V3 — best overall value
r = client.chat.completions.create(
model="deepseek/deepseek-chat",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
# Qwen Plus — Chinese/English bilingual
r = client.chat.completions.create(
model="qwen/qwen-plus",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "你好!"}],
)
# GLM-4 Flash — nearly FREE ($0.01/M)
r = client.chat.completions.create(
model="zhipu/glm-4-flash",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Classify this..."}],
)50 free calls. No Chinese account needed. WeChat Pay supported.
Get free API key