How much do Chinese models cut your API bill? 🇨🇳

WITH THE SAME OUTPUT!!!

US frontier model → chinese open model, cost to do one task:

[ reasoning brain ]
Claude Opus 4.8 → DeepSeek V4 Pro
$1.80 → $0.04 per task
~45x cheaper, and it's tied with Opus on SWE-bench (80.6 vs 80.8)

[ code generation ]
GPT-5.5 → GLM 5.2
$1.03 → $0.48 per task
~2x cheaper AND it beats GPT-5.5 on long-horizon coding

[ agents + tool calling ]
Claude Sonnet 5 → Kimi K2.7
$2.29 → ~$0.31 per task
~7x cheaper, best agentic stability of the open models

[ bulk / high volume ]
Gemini 3.5 Flash → DeepSeek V4 Flash
$0.59 → $0.02 per task
~30x cheaper, plenty for extraction, classification, drafts

the tradeoff:
> coding + agents.. near parity or better
> hardest reasoning + world knowledge.. ~10-15% behind
> your bill.. down 2-45x depending on the task

one catch: Qwen3.7 Max is chinese but priced like frontier ($1.06/task).. cheap isn't automatic

route each task to the model that wins it:

code → GLM..
agents → Kimi..
value reasoning → DeepSeek..
bulk → DeepSeek Flash

keep a US frontier model for the 10% that truly needs it