The original title is "A Backend Engineer's Field Notes on Cheap AI APIs in 2026"

Short summary

A backend engineer shares field notes from comparing 30+ AI API providers ranked by output price, revealing a 350x spread from $0.01/M to $3.50/M output tokens. The core insight is a tiered routing system: ultra-budget models for classification, mid-range for production traffic, and premium for complex reasoning. The ranking table covers predominantly Chinese providers (Qwen, GLM, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance, DeepSeek) with practical production use-case annotations for each tier.

• •350x price spread between cheapest and most expensive AI APIs
• •Tiered routing system maps model cost to task complexity
• •Top 30 ranking dominated by Chinese providers with real production annotations

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.