OpenRouter is excellent — for Western devs paying in USD. If you're in China, blocked by GFW, or have no international card, OpenRouter is unusable. AIPower is the OpenAI-compatible alternative built for cross-border developers.
16 AI models · WeChat Pay / Alipay / card · 10 free trial calls · No VPN, no +86 phone
OpenRouter accepts USD card and crypto. If your only payment options are WeChat Pay, Alipay, or CNY card, you can't top up. Stripe also flags many international cards from China as high-risk.
Direct OpenRouter access from China is unreliable — sometimes works, sometimes blocked. You end up needing a VPN, which kills latency and breaks production.
OpenRouter routes 300+ models, but only via Western proxies — limited DeepSeek, no direct Qwen, no GLM, no Doubao, no MiniMax. You lose the price advantage of accessing them natively.
Same OpenAI-compatible API. One-line change to switch.
WeChat Pay (CNY) · Alipay (CNY/USD) · Card (USD/HKD/CNY). $5 minimum top-up. Powered by Stripe — same security as OpenRouter, just with non-Western payment methods enabled.
Hosted on Cloudflare Workerswith 280+ global edge POPs. Fast access from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen — no VPN required. We don't use a single US-based origin.
First-party integration with DeepSeek V3 + R1, Qwen Plus + Turbo, GLM-4 Flash + 5.1, Kimi K2.5, Doubao Pro, MiniMax Text 01. Direct provider pricing, not US-proxied markup.
GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all accessible from inside China through the same API key. No VPN. No separate billing. One balance covers everything.
# Before — OpenRouter (works only outside China)
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
api_key="sk-or-...",
)
# After — AIPower (works in China + everywhere)
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://api.aipower.me/v1", # ← only change
api_key="sk-aipower-...",
)
# Same call, more models
r = client.chat.completions.create(
model="anthropic/claude-sonnet", # works from China
# or model="deepseek/deepseek-chat" — first-party, not proxied
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
)We're not trying to replace OpenRouter for everyone. We replace it for cross-border developers.
10 free trial calls. WeChat Pay + Alipay supported. Same OpenAI SDK.