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APICLAN vs paying the provider directly

The comparison people expect is a price table. The price table is the easy part. The part worth reading is what the lower price does not include.

The price difference is real and it is large

Per 1M tokens	Official list	Here	You save
gpt-6-astra	$10.00 / $50.00	$2.00 / $10.00	80%
gpt-5.6-sol	$5.00 / $30.00	$1.00 / $6.00	80%
claude-opus-5	$5.00 / $25.00	$1.50 / $7.50	70%
claude-sonnet-5	$2.00 / $10.00	$0.600 / $3.00	70%
grok-4.6	$2.00 / $6.00	$0.550 / $1.65	72%

These are published rates, not introductory offers, and they are the same numbers your invoice uses. Each model's page shows the arithmetic.

What a direct account gives you that this does not

• A contract. A direct account comes with terms you can send to a lawyer, a data processing agreement, and a counterparty that can be held to it. That matters more than price the moment a customer asks you to prove where their data goes.
• Every model the day it ships. Providers launch on their own API first. Anything downstream, including us, arrives later.
• Rate limits you can raise by asking. Direct accounts have quota that scales with spend and a support path to increase it.
• Invoicing and procurement. Card, invoice, purchase order, tax documents. We take USDT on TRON, which many finance departments will simply refuse.
• Provider-side features. Batch endpoints, fine-tuning, enterprise data controls and region pinning are account-level features that do not survive a relay.

What you get here instead

• A published fraction of list, on every call. No commitment, no minimum, no annual contract to negotiate the discount.
• One endpoint across vendors. Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok behind a single OpenAI-compatible base URL — switching model is a one-word change, not a new SDK and a new key.
• No monthly floor. A month where you build nothing costs nothing. Direct accounts do the same, but the subscription products people compare us to do not.
• Balance that does not expire, refundable within 7 days of a top-up.

The decision, as we would actually make it

If you are shipping a product with real customers whose data you are answerable for, or if your company needs a signed agreement before it can use a vendor, go direct. The price difference will not cover the first compliance conversation you cannot win.

If you are building, prototyping, running agents against your own code, or operating a small product where the API bill is a line item you feel every month, the arithmetic above is the argument, and there is nothing to negotiate to get it.

A third option people forget: use both. Direct for the customer-facing path that needs the contract, and a relay for development, evaluation and internal tooling, which is usually where most of the token count lives and none of the compliance risk does.

Start using it

No subscription, no monthly minimum, no sales call. Top up with USDT and spend what you use — 1 USDT gives you 2 credits of API balance.

Read the 30-second quickstart

Competitor terms quoted from their own published documentation and checked on 2026-09-06. Our prices are regenerated automatically from live billing data.