TMTPost: The End of Huge Profits from Reselling Tokens—How Many Ways Can AI Relay Stations Survive?
TMTPost reported that major model companies such as Alibaba Cloud, DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiniMax, and Kimi have successively opened stores on e-commerce platforms, with AI subscriptions and Token top-ups becoming new categories for Double 11, but small API relay stations that rely on price-difference arbitrage are facing shutdown and transformation. The article mentions that some relay stations quote Claude Fable 5.1 at about 15% of the official price, and an audit by a German CISPA research team found that shadow APIs had performance differences of up to 47.21%, with 45.83% failing model fingerprint identity verification. Compliance transformation, cloud vendors' packaged services, and telecom operators' Token packages are listed in the article as several ways out, while SiliconFlow had revenue of 55.33 million yuan in 2025, a gross margin of -24%, and a net loss of about 345 million yuan.
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