Chinese LLM API Pricing Comparison 2026: The Definitive Buyer's Guide
If you're shopping for LLM APIs in 2026, Chinese vendors are impossible to ignore. As of August 21, 2026 (always check official pricing pages for the final word), flagship Chinese models charge between ¥4.00 and ¥12.00 per million input tokens — with ERNIE 5.1 at ¥4.00, GLM-5.1 at ¥6.00, Kimi K2.6 at ¥6.50, DeepSeek V4 Pro at ¥9.00, and Qwen3.7 Max at ¥12.00. Budget-tier input can be as low as ¥0.20 (Qwen3.5 Flash), and value models like DeepSeek V4 are 80–98% cheaper than GPT-5.5-class peers. But don't pick a model on sticker price alone. Cache hit rates, endpoint access, and tool-calling fit often matter more than nominal list prices. The data below was verified against official pricing pages by llmabacus on 2026-08-21. Chinese vendors have turned quarterly price cuts into a structural competitive weapon: DeepSeek V4 Flash, for example, offers cached input at ¥0.10 per million tokens — just 1/30th of its standard input price. 2026 Chinese LLM API Pricing Landscape: An Overview The 2026 Chinese LLM market is shaped by three forces: Hardware cost deflation — cheaper compute keeps pushing prices down. Escalating domestic price wars — vendors undercut each other every quarter. Aggregator endpoints — services that arbitrage price gaps and unify access. As of Aug 2026, tracking firm pricepertoken lists 610+ models globally, 43 of them free. Paid input prices range from roughly $0 to $150 per million tokens. Chinese vendors sit in the lowest price band, and many update prices quarterly — as Morph noted in its 2026-06-28 analysis: "LLM prices change every quarter." Final prices are subject to each vendor's official pricing page: DeepSeek Alibaba Cloud Bailian/Qwen Moonshot/Kimi Zhipu GLM Baidu ERNIE Tencent Hunyuan The main camps remain unchanged: DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen dominate the extreme value tier. Kimi (Moonshot) differentiates on ultra-long context. GLM (Zhipu) , Doubao , and Tencent Hunyuan serve the domestic enterprise market. OpenAI , Claude , and Gemini hol