Guides & pitfalls
Practical material on AI API relay services: how rates are calculated, how to verify a model has not been downgraded, what enterprises should check before buying, and the pitfalls we ran into while measuring these services ourselves.
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Who handles your request: the data boundaries inside a relay chain
Between your prompt and the model, a relay service adds one or more hops. Each hop is a place your data passes through.…
Account throttled or banned: the common triggers for relay service risk controls
Getting limited by a relay service is rarely random. The triggers are usually observable in advance, and most of them co…
A relay service starts erroring or slowing down: how to tell whose problem it is
"When it breaks, everyone blames the relay." Usually the truth is more specific: it could be your client, the relay, the…
Give a relay service a health check: a 20-minute verification checklist
Before you put real money on an account, twenty minutes of structured testing tells you most of what you need. This is t…
Six signals that a relay service is about to disappear
Relay services rarely vanish without warning. These six signals can be observed beforehand, each with a way to check it…
What a relay service's "rate" actually means: 1.0, 0.3 and 0.05 explained
The rate is the only common language in relay pricing, and the number most easily dressed up in sales talk. This piece n…
Three ways to reach Claude from mainland China: official, relay, mirror
There are really three paths to using Claude with Claude Code from mainland China: a direct official connection, a third…
Six common tricks in cheap relay services, and how to spot each one
Not every low price is a scam, but every scam opens with a low price. These six tricks are ordered from most common to m…
How to check whether a relay service is quietly downgrading your model
Downgrading is the hardest problem to detect, because the fraudster only has to change one field. Here is a combined tes…
One key, many models: how to choose an aggregating relay service
If your product uses Claude, GPT and Gemini at once, talking to three vendors directly means three sets of keys and thre…
2026 model API pricing review: who actually got cheaper
Prices fell again across the board this year, but they fell in different ways: some headline cuts, some cache pricing, s…
Corporate procurement of a relay service: invoices, contracts, compliance and risk control
If you are buying for yourself, rates and stability are enough. Corporate procurement has to clear three more gates: inv…
Supporting data & tools
The articles explain the method; the pages below give you measured data and prices to check it against. Reading them together is easier — once you know how to tell whether a rate is real, you can look the official price up in the price list.