After I handed my workspace over to agents in May, my token usage went completely off the rails (see [My Token Usage Exploded 13× in Three Months]). Then DeepSeek raised its prices in August, the official API became genuinely unaffordable, and the only thing left to do was hunt down cheap third parties. So over the past six months I’ve tried pretty much every token plan (monthly or prepaid quota) I could get my hands on — three Chinese cloud vendors and five overseas ones.

This isn’t a recommendation list. It’s just a record of what I ran into: the good parts praised, the painful parts reported as they were.