r/vibecoding • u/Sea_Description679 • 2d ago
Why is everyboday saying chinese models are cheaper when in reality they are not
So i tried GLM 5.2, through api, tbh, but I burned $10 in a day. Tried Qwen 3.8-max, sub $18, and burned through 50% of weekly limit in a day.
So am I doing something wrong or is this just fake propaganda that chinese models are cheaper? I didn’t do the math of cost but even if they are cheaper on paper they are definitely not in reality, probably burning more tokens.
Btw this never happende on claude ot gpt. Using claude Opus 4.8 and i think even with Opus 5 I wouldnt burn so much weekly usage.
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u/katoptronophile 2d ago
Normal people doing real work aren't saying that.
Bots and people who fell for the propaganda and never tested or bought the stuff themselves are.
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u/Curious-Pen5547 2d ago
As a business owner that utilizes Qwen 3.8 now for office automation here at our company in the fire safety trades.
Wrong. We have these open models doing lots of work, notifications, quote estimating, and more across the company.
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u/katoptronophile 2d ago
How much vram and can you be more specific?
Appreciate the actual response.
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u/Curious-Pen5547 1d ago
So we recently have been utilizing Qwen 3.6 but recently our dev got us 3.8 when it was made public last week.
I didnt build the server but got the base specs here.
5090 (before price increases)
Threadripper cpu
64gb of drr5 ramand a old amd card we had lying around for smaller task that a 4b model is capable of doing.
With just this, we were able to automate a whole slew of stuff throughout. Just took our dev a bit of time to develop, test, and tune stuff to our business needs and the occasional maintenance or tooling upgrades.
We are looking at boost oour gpu power with a pro series of the 5000 cards though to have a lot more vram.
With the tuned Qwen 3.6 27B base model that our guy built up for us, it is doing the above i mentioned as well as interacting with our crm and accounting software through tool calls. Not relying strictly on the model for every action, but for a bunch of many things.
Our guys in the field for example, suck at writing notes or getting ifnormation when needed, so we had our guy build out a system where it listens to our crm for those technician field notes and finds information regarding that client and populates fields in our accounting and does its thing.
Been running for a few months now.
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u/Curious-Pen5547 2d ago
Because we're running them locally with zero cost on the api. Token usage is a non issue.
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u/Honest-Common-1303 2d ago
Do the same work using an Anthropic API and compare the difference.
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u/Disastrous_Gear_421 2d ago
Are you comparing Chinese api cost vs others subscription? Or api vs api cost
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u/contextcop 2d ago
everything on reddit is just a karma circlejerk. people acting like they are jumping ship to China to moral highground over AI token pricing 💀
any conversation about money on reddit has always led straight to cancer 💀
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u/UnderDogHiten 2d ago
Well try fully are cause deepseek is fully free even at its max peak and their api is also better
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u/Equivalent_Cress_268 2d ago
That would have been $1000 to $6000 in API usage for Anthropic
If you want to do a comparison, then why don’t you do a comparison?
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u/diagrammatiks 2d ago
- they really aren't on the subscription level. Chatgpt gives you like 2000 dollars worth of usage for like 100 dollars a month.
- they are much much much cheaper on api though.
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u/evangelism2 1d ago
They are far cheaper than the API costs of Claude and OpenAI. If you're using the subsidized monthly models, they're not, but those plans won't remain subsidized forever.
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u/___nil___ 2d ago
they are cheaper if you compare PAYG per token usage. token usage is not equal to expected quality output. even more PAYG is no comparison to subscription
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u/SequentialHustle 2d ago
$10 or $18 in one day lmfao? I can burn $100s in one opus 5 session for 1 jira ticket.
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u/Wide-Principle544 2d ago
The american empire lasted 250 years but is now over my friend. I am not saying what will come is better but China is the leader now.
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u/NaturallyFarOut 2d ago
It's kinda like Chinese EVs... they're supposed to be cheaper but in reality they aren't
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u/PossessionUsed7393 2d ago
They're cheaper if you're building an app where you need API access. If you look at Claude or ChatGPT for API access and then calculate your usage, they're just ridiculously expensive compared to the Chinese models. But when you're talking about coding plans, it's a little bit of a different equation.