Comment by Aurornis
10 hours ago
The original article linked in the opening has more context https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market
People trading their unused credits feels more genuine, although still in violation of the agreements. The person who got into YC Startup School who was trying to resell the $2500 of credits was interesting. It wouldn’t be that hard for OpenAI to identify the IP addresses of the relays and start flagging accounts, tracing it back to the source. Risking burning your bridges with YC for a relatively small profit is a questionable decision.
The original article showed discounts ranging all the way up to 98%. At those levels it’s obviously not people reselling anything. It’s either sourced from stolen API keys, bought with stolen credit cards, or acquired through automated sign up of trial accounts if you’re actually getting the API you request.
I would expect a lot of them are reselling a different API. Sign up for Anthropic tokens and get Deepseek responses instead.
Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend.
But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.
It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.
I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside
Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense.
YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers.
It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).
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Costs also have to include the amortized training costs.
But the API price is likely simply regular supply and demand, charging as much as the market will pay. Corporations are dropping insane amounts because it's still peanuts for many industries. Software has just been ridiculously cheap before AI. So high prices are still low for companies if it eases some bottlenecks.
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“It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.”
There is no “real cost” other than the cost actually charged.
Open weight SOTA models are not greatly cheaper than Anthropic and providers don't have to cover training capex.
> Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend.
this is all it is. it's not complicated.
Except for the cases of credit card fraud, I don't see what's morally wrong with it, for it to be called "fraud".
It's just reselling.
Maybe people are starting to copy Anthropic's rhetoric of "everything that inconveniences me is fraud (e.g. distillation). Everything that benefits me is legit."
Lying to someone to deceive them into providing you with an economic benefit that they otherwise wouldn’t is textbook fraud.