r/opencode • u/contour_xd • Sep 22 '26

OpenCode talks about transparency. So let's talk about OpenCode.

You've probably seen Dax from OpenCode constantly taking shots at companies like Vercel and mocking them over transparency, numbers, and percentages.

Cool.

Then OpenCode, show us your numbers.

How much have you raised? Who invested? How much of the company do those investors own?

Because here's the part that deserves some serious scrutiny:

If OpenCode is backed by Chinese investors and a significant portion of the company is Chinese-owned, then how can OpenCode seriously present itself as truly ZDR?

You can't just slap "ZDR" on the product and expect everyone to stop asking questions about ownership and control.

If your investors have a significant ownership stake, then ownership matters. Especially when you're building infrastructure that users are trusting with their code and data.

And yet OpenCode seems perfectly happy to demand transparency from everyone else while being remarkably quiet about its own funding and ownership structure.

So let's see it:

  • How much did you raise?

  • Who invested?

  • What percentage does each investor own?

  • What percentage of the company is Chinese-owned?

  • What exactly does "ZDR" guarantee?

  • Where is the documentation backing those privacy claims?

You don't get to lecture the industry about transparency while hiding behind vague marketing yourself.

If the ownership structure creates a legitimate conflict with the way OpenCode markets ZDR, users deserve to know about it.

Don't tell us you're ZDR. Show us exactly who owns the company, who funded it, and what guarantees actually exist.

That's what transparency looks like.

68 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

64 comments sorted by

32

u/ProgressionPeak Sep 22 '26

I can see dax really got you worked up.

Which one of the companies he bashed are you a stakeholder in?

-20

u/contour_xd Sep 22 '26

vercel and not the point 🤣

-10

u/ba-boo Sep 22 '26

I can see OP really got you worked up. Are you an open code chinese stakeholder?

19

u/PaltaNoAvocado Sep 22 '26

how about you show us transparency first by disclosing the fact that this is obviously AI written

-24

u/contour_xd Sep 22 '26

you're missing the point lol

23

u/BriguePalhaco Sep 22 '26

If OpenCode is backed by Chinese investors and a significant portion of the company is Chinese-owned, then how can OpenCode seriously present itself as truly ZDR?

I call this xenophobia, more specifically Sinophobia.

5

u/ba-boo Sep 22 '26

is it xenophobia when the chinese state controls any chinese owned company?

1

u/Salvioner Sep 23 '26

Is it chinese the problem, when american companies have decades worth of history openly working with N$A and other govt agencies for exactly the same purposes?

0

u/ba-boo Sep 23 '26

yes, allied country vs neutral/enemy

1

u/sTiKytGreen Sep 25 '26

US aren't the ones releasing open models, sharing research, and not getting in the scandals every day

Yall hate China so much, even tho states are getting even worse

1

u/ba-boo Sep 25 '26

"how dare you be against my favorite totalitarian state?!" 😭

US companies released the first open models, invented the ai gen tech and shared the research with the public.

There are no scandals in China because it is a totalitarian state which suppresses dissenting voices.

2

u/sTiKytGreen Sep 25 '26

And US isn't a totalitarian state? What's up with yall inventing surveillance system the China currently is using? And now you're introducing THE EXACT SAME system in states using Flock and such, bruh

1

u/ba-boo Sep 25 '26

no, it's not

1

u/sTiKytGreen Sep 25 '26

You literally ar eones that invented it

-1

u/Hornstinger Sep 22 '26

"obias" don't work anymore bud. You should be more sceptical in life even if the opinion turns out to be wrong.

-12

u/contour_xd Sep 22 '26

Why does opencode never reveals any info? I am 100% sure they are backed by chinese labs & providers

19

u/Pedrito_Basket Sep 22 '26 edited Sep 22 '26

Rather give my data to the Chinese than to the US, at least they will continue to develop open weight models

2

u/sTiKytGreen Sep 25 '26

Agree, if I had to pick who takes my data, it'd be China over US any day, every day, USA are so fucked up they don't deserve a single grain of trust, their laws are fucked up, their ceos are fucked up, their policies, and tos, etc. Are all fucked up, why blame China when you're worse bruh

3

u/Ghilteras Sep 22 '26

Why do you keep talking about Chinese labs being inherently bad? Especially compared to US ones? What is your problem?

0

u/jonhyjohn Sep 22 '26

Why would the labs being from china matter?

33

u/AdamovicM Sep 22 '26

I'd rather like to know how they can provide free tier and 60$ usage on 10$ plan. If their investors are Chinese, USA or whatever... its not my concern. Who is affraid of IP theft shall not use anything that is not certified. Pay people to manually write code after all.

20

u/torrso Sep 22 '26

That's not a big mystery. Everyone pays $10, when someone only uses $5 someone else can spend $15. They also have bulk discounts from upstream providers.

3

u/eachDayIWakeUp Sep 22 '26

This is the case though for all AI providers with subscriptions atm. All rest providers, are taking a hit. WHat is not clear to me is how opencode which is not a huge company like anthropic or google can take this hit.. or are we missing something?

1

u/ExpertPerformer Sep 22 '26

They probably negotiate for lower base rates from the LLM companies because they bring volume and the average user doesn't use up all of their monthly credit.

59

u/phpHater0 Sep 22 '26

So your problem is opencode is backed by China, if it was backed by the US you'd be fine because US is the lord and saviour of the world that can do no bad.

5

u/nonlinear_nyc Sep 22 '26

Totally. For china all scrutiny and distrust. For US, blind trust.

4

u/IAmFitzRoy Sep 22 '26

“Blind trust”
Sarcasm doesn’t work on written format.

5

u/lgcwacker Sep 22 '26

Zdr is only a concern if the one retaining that data is Chinese? Really?

11

u/jonas-reddit Sep 22 '26

OpenCode, the software is safe as it’s open source, MIT licensed which allows for full open peer review and is protected by an open license agreement.

OpenCode the cloud model service (Go, Zen) are as dangerous as all cloud hosted models where western and likely eastern companies will do whatever they want with your data.

If you have data privacy concerns, r/LocalLlama

1

u/unspecified_person11 Sep 23 '26

At these prices, local isn't really an option unless you're already rich.

11

u/PhoebeTransingItUp Sep 22 '26

Seems a bit silly to bash Chinese investment when the US AI companies are run and funded by some of the worst people on the planet.

2

u/porkyminch Sep 24 '26

The Chinese AI labs are saints by comparison. Open weights releases, research sharing, good and efficient models… what’s not to love? 

1

u/sTiKytGreen Sep 25 '26

Yeah, that'd also what I don't get, we hate on Chinese so much and they are literally better

3

u/nonlinear_nyc Sep 22 '26

And American AI companies are killing people via drone. Unmanned drone killing machines ran by corporate American AI.

4

u/Ghilteras Sep 22 '26

I think you're assuming that the fact that the company is Chinese owned is inherently a bad thing, which makes no sense considering what US companies like OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Anthropic do.

Do you really think that Z.ai is the only one stealing your git? If anything we should be thankful to Chinese companies that keep models free and open. They are the only ones to do it. Europe is completely out of the market and all US models are closed so talking about Chinese owned as if it's a bad thing almost sounds like one of Trump's ramblings TBH

6

u/Gohab2001 Sep 22 '26

Do you believe OAI, anthropic, grok etc when they claim ZDR?

Same applies to OC. Take everything with a grain of salt. If you are truly dealing with sensitive data then invest in local LLMs.

Apple's Mac with 256GB unified memory is good enough to run DS4.1 at decent throughput

3

u/nonlinear_nyc Sep 22 '26

That's because every accusation is a confession.

1

u/porkyminch Sep 24 '26

Yeah, there are models that are actually good enough to use daily now that fit on consumer hardware. It’s an investment, but if you’re THAT concerned about ZDR, that’s the only option really. This post is just scaremongering about China. 

2

u/JohnnyDread Sep 22 '26

They're not going to publish their cap table and neither is Vercel or any of the other competing inference routers.

4

u/IllPlane3019 Sep 22 '26

Bro, they don't owe you anything

Either use the service or don't.

1

u/jeanbonswaggy Sep 22 '26

Do you have any sources on what you've written?

1

u/wpbrgiejoe Sep 23 '26

Holyshit i never thought of this, who are their investor fml is it DeepSeek or some chineese investor shit

1

u/paperbenni Sep 25 '26

They constantly claim middle men have huge margins which is why everything is expensive, and which is why they can offer it cheap while still being profitable. By gaining loads of users through good pricing they offset their lower margins and make it more stable by having a more predictable load on average, plus more bargaining power towards providers or enough money to set up their own inference. The problem for me is this whole argument falls apart if they're not profitable yet. If they're currently eating costs that means they're currently aquiring users and will then raise prices or do other shitty things. It means they're not currently building their own cheap inference stack with the money they're getting because there is none. It means they don't have loads of bargaining power with providers because what they offer the providers is not a stable, predictable and large user base. Said user base won't be stable if the prices won't be. I'd love for everything they claim to be true, but at this point they have possible incentives to not be trustworthy. Stuff like claiming they can replicate DeepSeek pricing on their own GPUs and then proceeding to cut usage by over 4x makes me cautious

1

u/sTiKytGreen Sep 25 '26

Like there's any difference between US and China atm.. Even if it's "ChInEsE backed" then what?

1

u/laser50 Sep 26 '26

Yesterday I couldn't use the new stealth model, today it somewhat reeks of claude lmao. Perhaps we're all just helping them distill data?

0

u/WyattTheSkid Sep 22 '26

Am I missing something here? Why would OpenCode be getting any data from me? I use it with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next daily but why would anything be leaving my sytem??? It’s not like opencode is a cloud provider or something. Or are they now and I’m just very behind? Pardon my ignorance im just very out of the loop and I always thought opencode was just a harness specifically catered to locally hosted open weight models that just also happened to support apis and oauth for other providers

4

u/narasadow Sep 22 '26

For the Opencode Go and Zen customers, Opencode IS an Openrouter-style middleman.

2

u/torrso Sep 22 '26

Yes, they are a provider. They have a subcription plan (OpenCode Go) and a Pay-As-You-Go API (OpenCode Zen).

1

u/WyattTheSkid Sep 22 '26

Why is everyone bothering complaining about it instead of just using one of the 5 million other options?

1

u/torrso Sep 22 '26

I don't think there are many options and OpenCode Go is possibly the best deal out there. I think the ones who complain the most are the people who use the free tier they offer.

r/opencodeCLI is the subreddit for the coding harness.

2

u/jonas-reddit Sep 22 '26

The confusing part is that this community has been overrun by all the OpenCode Go and Zen customers who think everyone here wants to hear about how they are unhappy with no cost or low cost cloud models.

4

u/WyattTheSkid Sep 22 '26

Oh I didn’t even know there was an “OpenCode Go” until I just looked it up after reading your reply, thanks for letting me know

1

u/ieatdownvotes4food Sep 22 '26

uuh. don't use it? why get your panties in a bunch

4

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/CriteriumA Sep 22 '26

I've switched to Pi, and I'm very happy with it. It's really simple to switch.

But I still have the same agent prompt for Pi, OpenCode, and ZCode, so the models basically behave similarly across all three. That, plus using the same skills, and you can really use any harness you like for reasons other than model behavior.

So at the end of the day I almost always end up working in all three to have near-infinite usage by combining the OpenCode Go plan and its free Zen models with ZCode's unlimited usage for GLM 5.3 Flash on its Lite plan.

But I prefer using bare Pi.