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.

DeepSeek recently officially raised its prices. As someone whose token usage was closing in on 100M tokens last quarter (see [My Token Usage Exploded 13× in Three Months]), I didn’t pay much attention at first — after all, DeepSeek was already very cheap, and even the raised price was still lower than the official price announced when V4 first launched. But I underestimated my usage: after a day of real-world testing at the new prices, it became clear that the cost is genuinely hard for an individual to bear. If I didn’t find a way around it, I’d be working just to pay for tokens.