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In short: the provider’s official price is the cost floor for any honest reseller. Large customers do get discounts, but not 90–98%. If Claude, GPT or Gemini is sold at 2–10% of the official price, the tokens almost certainly don’t come from the official API: they come from resold subscriptions, trial credits, other people’s accounts, or a swapped model. It works until it gets shut down — and your balance goes with it.

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How cheap it gets

Offers we saw on the market on 27.10.2026, compared with the providers’ official prices ($ per 1M tokens, input / output):
Official prices are from the Anthropic, OpenAI and Google pricing pages. For Gemini 3.8 Flash this is Google’s promotional price, valid until 31.12.2026.
The same price for input and output is a hint in itself: all three providers charge 4–6× more for output than for input. If the seller doesn’t care how many tokens the model writes, they are most likely paying for something other than tokens.

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Where such prices come from

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What it costs you

  • Outages. A channel works until the account behind it is banned. Today every request goes through, tomorrow none do, and round it goes.
  • A hidden system prompt. If someone appends their own instructions to your request along the way, the model answers differently: extra tokens, unexpected refusals, a different coding style.
  • Your data. Your prompts and code pass through third parties’ accounts. If the service has no legal entity or address, there is no one to hold responsible for a leak.
  • Your money. Your balance lives as long as the service does. If refunds are only given when the whole service is down, everything else is your risk.
  • A floating price. If the price is recalculated every minute, you can’t budget a project.

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How to spot it

  • Flagship models cost a fraction of the official price, and the service doesn’t explain where the discount comes from.
  • The terms and the website name no legal entity, country, address or governing law.
  • One model has dozens of unnamed “routes” with different prices and reliability, and the price changes every few minutes.
  • Input and output cost the same, although the provider charges several times more for output.
  • The only way to reach them is Telegram.

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How to pay less honestly

You can save without grey schemes:
  • Prompt caching. Agents and chatbots send the same context over and over. Repeated context read from the cache costs at least 10× less than regular input — see Prompt caching.
  • The right model for the job. Routine work is fine on inexpensive models — deepseek-flash, claude-haiku-5-5, gpt-5.4-mini, gemini-3.8-flash. Keep flagships for hard tasks.
  • History and answer length. Cap max_tokens and don’t feed the whole project into the agent. How to work it out — see How to cut your Claude Code and Cline bill.
  • Provider promotions. Providers cut prices for a while: for example, Google halved Gemini 3.8 Flash prices until 31.12.2026, and RuAPI’s prices dropped the same way — see the changelog.

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How RuAPI does it

  • Original models — no swapping and no silent downgrades.
  • Major models have backup channels: if one channel fails, the request automatically goes to another.
  • Prices are fixed and visible before you pay. They change when the providers’ prices change, and we post every change in the changelog.
  • Every request is visible in the Console log: model, tokens, charge.
  • The operator is CYBERBIT PTE. LTD. (Singapore): see the terms of use; an unspent balance can be refunded within 7 days of the top-up — see the refund policy.

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FAQ

It works until the accounts your requests go through are banned. For a one-off try that may not matter. If your product or workflow depends on the API, an outage on any given day and a vanished balance cost more than you saved.
There are: large customers negotiate volume and prepayment discounts with providers. But such discounts don’t turn $20 per 1M tokens into $0.30. And a reseller buying at a discount still has to cover its own costs.
The model field in the response proves nothing — the service writes it itself. It’s more reliable to test the capabilities the provider advertises: context length, image input, function calling. You can also compare answers to the same hard task with the official chat.
Because we buy tokens legally and can’t sell them below cost. You can still save honestly: with prompt caching and the right model, a coding agent often costs several times less than at list price without caching.

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Next

Prompt caching

Repeated context at least 10× cheaper.

Cut your Claude Code and Cline bill

What drives the cost and how to lower it.

Prices for all models

Current prices per 1M tokens.

How to buy USDT

Crypto Bot, Bybit P2P or an exchanger — three ways.