I vibe code 100M+ tokens with Codex and GPT-5.4 for ~$1/day — some stories from China

GPT-5.4/5.5 API at 96–97% off official pricing — that's what's openly sold on China's second-hand marketplaces. Not a scam — I've benchmarked them, they're real frontier models.

I'm a CS student in China and pretty new to Reddit. I've been browsing r/ChatGPT, r/ClaudeCode and r/vibecoding lately, reading threads about AI tools being too expensive — Claude Code hitting the 5-hour Pro rate limit in under 20 minutes, etc. As a developer living in a completely different ecosystem, I thought my experience might be interesting.

On Xianyu and Taobao (China's equivalents of eBay and Amazon), vendors openly sell GPT API access at around 0.2–0.3 RMB per USD of official pricing (~3-4% of official; Claude is pricier at 10-20%). My schoolmates and I use these daily, burning 100M+ GPT-5.4 tokens for about $1.

My daily setup

I vibe code with GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.6 (I prefer 4.6 over 4.7) every day. Payment through WeChat or Alipay, no complicated setup — the proxy station's API handles everything, including crossing China's Great Firewall.

Among programmers and CS students I know, adoption is close to 100%. It's as normal as using GitHub. Engineers at some of China's largest tech companies also use proxy-routed Codex/Claude Code for non-sensitive work.

Why not Chinese models?

GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 are generally considered stronger than the Chinese alternatives for coding. But here's the real surprise — on the grey market, GPT is almost as cheap as DeepSeek. When the best model costs about the same as the budget option, most developers I know pick the best. Some still use domestic models, but the grey market has shifted the default choice.

What this market looks like

Proxy stations operate openly on Xianyu and Taobao, and QQ (China's Telegram). The market has developed price-comparison sites and quality-testing platforms tracking each proxy's uptime, latency, and pricing (see the image). Major stations run QQ after-sales groups with tens of thousands of members who actively review service quality. They operate as brands, with some surviving over six months.

How it's so cheap

It's arbitrage. OpenAI gives paid subscribers access to Codex with generous quotas — more than 10x the subscription cost at API rates. People reverse-engineered the Codex interface into a standard API proxy (search GitHub for CLIProxyAPI), then stack subscriptions from low-price regions like the Philippines and zero-cost ChatGPT Plus trial abuse to crush costs further.

Claude is a different story — Anthropic's security is much tighter, so grey-market Claude runs at 10–20% of official API pricing, significantly more expensive than GPT's ~3%. Most supply comes from reverse-engineered access through Kiro IDE and Antigravity.

The catch

• Data privacy — your code passes through the proxy's servers. Rumors say some operators sell interaction data to domestic AI labs for distillation and LLM post-training.
• Reliability — accounts get banned constantly; operators keep replenishing the pool.

The prevailing attitude: "I already gave my data to OpenAI/Anthropic — what's one more middleman?"

Final thought

When the black-market price drops to 3% of official, it points to a massive arbitrage gap in the pricing structure. This is a mature supply chain. Nearly every developer and CS student I know is on it — including engineers at some of China's largest tech companies.

For anyone who wants the full picture, this deep dive from an Oxford researcher covers the proxy station economy in detail: How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China

Happy to answer questions.