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The AI Credit Resale Economy
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoCool to see my thesis validated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664223
- arjie 2mo agoYunwu.ai was a nice way to get ultra-cheap tokens that someone will probably spy on you with, but they no longer offer US models. At first I thought it was so people could steal the traces, but now I wonder if this isn't just laundering startup credits for dollars.
- npn 2mo agoThere are like thousands sites with similar features all using newapi core. You can easily find them in Chinese tech forum linux.do
- SatishPophale 2mo agoyep, with projects like open api/newapi it takes maybe 10 min to pin up and openAi compatible poxy gateway. The cheap prices look tempting until the relay operator logs all your prompts or the upstream account gets banned mid-request.
- theli0nheart 2mo agoThey were never offering actual US models. We tested them extensively and it was clear whatever they were passing as Anthropic were simply mediocre distillations based on Kimi.
- arjie 2mo agoHaha! Incredible. What a scam! Too good to be true, I suppose. I never used it for anything meaningful because everything meaningful is also tragically sensitive so I suppose I didn't notice.
- topbanana 2mo agoSo are they stealing from their employers or is something else going on?
- huflungdung 2mo agoStolen credit cards Demo accounts Free trials Unlimited chat relays (eg chatgpt chat) Leaked company credentials Etc
- notpushkin 2mo agoAnd I’m pretty sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- dzonga 2mo agonope - a.i companies to promote their platforms offer 'a.i' credits to startups usually worth 10ks, 100ks worth of credits in $ terms. so to a startup - you can trade your credits - then get actual cash. just like you would if trading debt etc.
- rfgplk 2mo agoWhat is the logic behind selling at such a steep discount? Lack of buyers or trust? Seems insane to sell tham at -50% or more, especially since you can use them yourself (if you're a startup)
- manquer 2mo agoRisk-reward calculus. A buyer may not take the risk or hassle of going underground only for a small upside. Basically it is not as tempting at 90% of list price, but it is at 10% .
- TZubiri 2mo agoMen breaching Sauron's ToS by reselling their nine rings of power, and they think they are beating the system.
- bix6 2mo ago> CREDITS FROM YC STARTUP SCHOOL Join YC, get free shit from the network, profit. Nice.
- notpushkin 2mo ago> CREDITS FROM YC STARTUP SCHOOL Is that still a thing? I’ve thought they’ve discontinued the deals section. (There are a lot of other ways to get a startup grant, of course.)
- pocksuppet 2mo agoWhat will you pitch to YC to get accepted?
- freakynit 2mo ago"Cheap tokens marketplace" ... like openrouter, but, 80% cheaper .. lol
- andy99 2mo agoAs a bonus, you’ve got a story for the “tell me about a time you hacked a non computer system” question on the YC application
- ValentineC 2mo agoReselling something one gets for free doesn't sound like a very clever hack.
- Aurornis 2mo agoThe original article linked in the opening has more context https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market People trading their unused credits feels more genuine, although still in violation of the agreements. The person who got into YC Startup School who was trying to resell the $2500 of credits was interesting. It wouldn’t be that hard for OpenAI to identify the IP addresses of the relays and start flagging accounts, tracing it back to the source. Risking burning your bridges with YC for a relatively small profit is a questionable decision. The original article showed discounts ranging all the way up to 98%. At those levels it’s obviously not people reselling anything. It’s either sourced from stolen API keys, bought with stolen credit cards, or acquired through automated sign up of trial accounts if you’re actually getting the API you request. I would expect a lot of them are reselling a different API. Sign up for Anthropic tokens and get Deepseek responses instead.
- judge2020 2mo agoAnother part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend. But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.
- ffsm8 2mo agoIt's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API. I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2mo agoOpen weight SOTA models are not greatly cheaper than Anthropic and providers don't have to cover training capex.
- fg137 2mo agoThese are amateurs compared to what's happening in China.
- herpdyderp 2mo agoExplain please?
- tclancy 2mo agoThey built this wall …
- thenthenthen 2mo agohttps://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
- ander33 2mo agoThis would be a fantastic method of getting data for distillation, would be surprised if that's not why the tokens are so cheap
- tclancy 2mo agoHey Claude, scan these marketplaces for arbitrage opportunities. The thing will eat itself unless the AI companies find a way to make money directly from it.
- peter_d_sherman 2mo agoSo let's see, we have the following factors in play: 1) Capitalism - Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes (Keynesian Economics), etc., etc. in most places in the world... 2) Huge validated existing international market... 3) Multi-jurisdictional World... laws/statutory codes applicable to businesses in specific circumstances in one place may not be applicable to businesses in specific circumstances in another... 4) AI Tokens are a commodity; i.e., there is no chokepoint or monopoly controlled by one AI company in one jurisdiction, i.e., if one AI company makes rules unacceptable to a token consumer, that consumer can simply switch providers to another provider in another jurisdiction somewhere else in the world. 5) Tokens can be bought, sold, and resold at profit just like any other good or service. 6) Tokens can be bought from anywhere in the world and sold to anywhere in the world. Easily. 7) Tokens are a digital good, easy to scale, and do not require supply chains, lead times, labor, manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, going through geographic chokepoints, customs, etc., etc. -- all of the things that manufactured goods do. 8) Many people around the world want to make money or make more money... i.e., "economic incentive" (aka Capitalism's "profit motive")... Well... add all of those together and what do you get? You get buy/sell/trade forums/auctions/individuals/brokers/businesspeople -- around that market... Just like you get those same things around every other market. In this large multi-jurisdictional world, if one government makes all of that illegal in their country, then another government is going to be happily collecting all of the taxes from making all of that legal, in theirs! If a given government makes trade illegal -- then they correspondingly lose the tax revenue... Taxes and trade are intricately, intricately intertwined... Could this business model be used for money laundering or other illegal activities? Yes -- but any other business model could as well! And, on the flip side, this business model could be accomplished legally/lawfully/morally/ethically -- just like any other business where there is an actual underlying value being exchanged. Because, AI Tokens, if legally/lawfully/morally/ethically traded, do have underlying value... In conclusion, at this point in time, I am neither for this business model nor against it... But I think it'll be highly interesting to watch this space for the next couple of years, to see what happens, to see who does what, to see what plays out on the legal front, on the government front (foreign + domestic), on the media front, and on the technology front surrounding it...
- nerevarthelame 2mo agoDistillation is one of the most unique and interesting aspects of this. But otherwise, if a company gives something valuable for creating an account on their platform, expect that people will automate the creation of millions of accounts. If employees of B2B partners get benefits, they will resell them. Accounts will be hacked and resold. The same basic abuse patterns are decades old for online delivery services, loyalty accounts for airline and hotels, etc. There are entire industries dedicated to those spaces as well: large organizations with physical offices, hundreds of employees, HR departments, etc. dedicated to reselling digital benefits on grey markets. Some companies are tolerant of allowing this to happen. The pessimistic view is that even illegitimate traffic contributes to the KPIs that your investors care about. The slightly less pessimistic view is that fraud prevention will always have trade-offs and false positives, and sometimes the savings of preventing fraud are genuinely outweighed by the false positives. Or maybe it's just Hanlon's razor and they truly never saw it coming.
- paybond-ai 2mo ago[flagged]
- dami14 2mo ago[flagged]
- tantalor 2mo ago> I checked where you’d expect to find underground marketplaces. Telegram had a few channels, with one being relatively active. It's not exactly "underground" if they clearly advertising public channels out in the open.
- veganmosfet 2mo agoThe reseller could use an intermediate proxy and modify the traffic like in [1], to get control of the client machine - depending on the harness permissions. TLS terminates at the proxy (say, https://reselltokens.ai https://reselltokens.ai), end to end integrity is not enforced. LLM traffic contains tool calls like "bash ...", which are executed on the client machine, they can be manipulated. Secret exfil is also possible. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2604.08407v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.08407v1
- MerriBan 2mo ago[flagged]
- rdbell 2mo agoYou can place your own CLIProxyAPI instance in front of the reseller proxy and block prompts/responses that look harmful. There are community plugins like this: https://github.com/rheodev/cpa-plugin-privacyfilter https://github.com/rheodev/cpa-plugin-privacyfilter I haven't tried the plugin system myself yet.
- jeffnash 2mo agoI swear every time I think I have a unique tweak for an OSS tool, it turns out someone else did it. I forked CLIProxyAPI myself to add something similar, though my implementation is closer to a provider-egress DLP layer and it's intended for API keys and the like, not PII. It uses gitleaks but also supports reversible redaction so a secret that's flagged can be replaced with a placeholder before CLIProxyAPI sends the request to the provider and then any instances of that placeholder can be rehydrated in the response to the caller. Since it modifies logic across the full request/response lifecycle, I unfortunately couldn't implement it cleanly with the existing plugin API.
- andai 2mo agoNice, he can help fix my Linux Bluetooth audio issues.
- byzantinegene 2mo ago
- tantalor 2mo agoThere's a lot of assertion here and the other article that this fraud and abuse but is there any evidence of that? A simpler explanation is that that this is just a resale market.
- mlenhard 2mo agoFrom talking with some of the companies experiencing this, I can confirm that a portion of it is actual credit card fraud. Tokens have become a pseudo-currency, making them a prime target for abuse. Some of the abuse is more benign, but there is also real fraud through chargebacks, account takeovers, and stolen credit cards.
- dataflow 2mo agoWhen you say a portion is that more like 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%, or 90%?
- mlenhard 2mo agoI don't have exact numbers here, and it varies by company, but a rough guess is around 10-20%. This might be a bit biased because the companies willing to talk to me are probably seeing the worst of it. Also, outside the labs, most of the companies I've talked with have shut off free tiers and free credits entirely because the abuse is so bad.
- thunderfork 2mo agoAny situation where you can extract a benefit from a stolen credit card and then sell that benefit before the chargeback renders it moot will have some fraud-based usage.
- baobabKoodaa 2mo agoCyberpunk dystopia vibes
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bwfan123 2mo ago> Cyberpunk dystopia vibes right. Abstractions taken to the max. When tech solves problems that only 0.001% care about. NFT smelt similar.
- andy99 2mo agoWhat does the demand side look like? I understand why people have these tokens they want to sell, who wants to buy them?
- namelosw 2mo agoChinese. There are large number of Chinese people who are dependent on the Western model because they're still ahead of the game. But they're continuously getting banned and getting super frustrated. Especially for Claude because Anthropic is very good at identifying mainland Chinese and getting them banned in hours. There are many of them who are willing to pay more than the original rate for a stable experience. It's very hard for them because they'll need a legit phone number and bank cards that are not issued in China, and a clean enough IP, etc. and those better match together to make sense. (Back in the day, ChatGPT required resident IPs, which made it worse, but they worry about growth more now). Obviously, they have to use a VPN to access the real Internet, and most of the IPs they can find are shared with bots and abusers.
- dataflow 2mo agoWhat does it mean for a phone number, bank card, and IP to "match together to make sense"?
- namelosw 2mo agoLike using a British SIM card like Giffgaff, a Singaporean bank card, and an American IP, speaking simplified Chinese, working in the Chinese timezone, which is often the obvious combination of Chinese users. Or using a Nigerian/Turkish App Store/Play Store, also very common. These combinations are questionable and very easy to filter, probably with Luna/Haiku tier of models that are able to tell things might get fishy here, and it would likely escalate to heavier checks and trigger KYC or straight banning. Those are only my guess and probably aren't how the system works, but I think these rules are fairly easy to come up with for developers who have any idea of anti-abuse. I've seen too many Chinese posts mourning their accounts and communicating that their setups there would be similar mechanisms, I would say. In previous months, there was news that Claude Code uploading a special signal for the Chinese timezone is pretty evident. I probably got away from having serious insomnia, using PST on my computers, and exclusively speaking English with those models lol.
- Sha1rholder 2mo agoThis research is way toooo shallow. He really should go check out linux.do or nodeseek.com — token resale economy there is truly breathtaking. Edit: https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market mentioned in comment.
- mlenhard 2mo agoThis was specifically meant to be about the ai credit resellers, not the relays themselves. I put together another piece here: https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market that tackles that side of the market.
- vb-8448 2mo agoWait a sec, I have to trust a third party with basically no reputation, did I get it right? It's basically asking for being hacked and/or sending you private data to random email addresses! Neither at a 99% discount I'd do it. I understand if someone, for any reason, cannot access a specific model ... But nowadays, there are so many alternatives that even this doesn't make sense any more.
- Aurornis 2mo agoI expect most of the use to be for bulk data processing or desperate founders who don't care, not for agentic coding use at promising startups. If your startup needs to run a million records of something, especially public data, through an LLM to extract the data you need, using bootleg tokens to shrink the bill starts feeling tempting. If you're concerned about the data leaking, the biggest risk is that the API backends are quietly routing your requests to a cheaper model. You might be trying to buy Opus tokens but get Deepseek Flash responses.
- vb-8448 2mo ago> to run a million records of something, especially public data, through an LLM to extract the data you need Maybe this make sense, but anyway I have to pay a lot of attention at the output I get. Eg: who guarantees there is no prompt/sql injection? Especially if I have to load the output in some internal system.
- Aurornis 2mo agoBulk data processing typically has structured JSON output. I mean someone could try to sneak prompt injection into a text field, but the people buying black market resale tokens from third parties aren’t thinking about anything other than getting cheap output.
- charlieyu1 2mo agoI mean reselling items bought with stolen credit cards have been a thing for at least 20 years
- RALaBarge 2mo agoMost of these are your standard botnet rings. Either accounts directly are taken over, and the attacker adds 2FA or carding rings take stolen #s and attempt to add credits. It is...incredible how many there are. Stripe does far too little in my opinion to help prevent issues like this, even though they have the business intelligence and enough data to do so.
- ronsor 2mo agoI think Stripe does enough already. Fraud detection is a crapshoot regardless; I've had legitimate transactions rejected at random without explanation.
- reticulates 2mo agoA common refrain is that oh there are such great margins on tokens that none of this matters… I wonder how long until that notion will be disavowed? The scale of the tokensnaffling is massive, not just from resale, but also people using multiple subscriptions. The amount of subsidization is only growing, every week it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing “resets” which allow a single $200 subscription to incur $20k+ of usage (if billed at API rates). At some point we must all surely accept that the economics of this do not work.
- ralph84 2mo agoOr API rates are their way of doing price discrimination and it's all profitable. Make sure Enterprises(tm) pay the Enterprise(tm) rate, but mop up the rest of the demand too at lower price points. This has been part of the software playbook for decades.
- xyst 2mo agoWhen "token futures contracts", start selling. Then the bubble is about to burst.
- quickthrowman 2mo agoCME is launching GPU compute futures in October: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/power/compute-futures.html https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/power/compute-future...
- 217 2mo ago"My rough estimate is that, across the sites, forums, and resellers I looked at, there are probably tens of millions of these credits being offered." Yeah very useful statemenet it's not like everyone spends hundreds of millions of tokens per day on the 100 or 200$ plan
- mlenhard 2mo agoThis was poorly worded on my part; I meant in terms of dollars, not tokens.
- zuzululu 2mo agoman seems like this entire thread invited a bunch of ads for exactly the thing talked about in the article can't they detect if someone is reselling their tokens like this ? doesn't seem too hard
- freakynit 2mo agoWhat if the model providers themselves don't want to? What if this itself is the way to bypass sanctions? What recent open models like deepseek v4 have now shown is that inference is actually much cheaper than what most people think.
- jeffchuber 2mo agothat one platform is using a flipped chroma logo - chroma has nothing to do with this racket (source : i’m chroma’s ceo)
- imnotr0b0t 2mo ago[dead]
- dmaa 2mo agoHow can you verify, that the model that you are buying is the one that you are actually getting?
- chrysoprace 2mo agoYou basically can't. This episode from Syntax[0] shows one provider that he tried to go through to showcase this, and he was fairly certain it wasn't Claude, but of course that was all speculation on his part. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09UELaUhPEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09UELaUhPEw
- macstrelioff 2mo agoWe built this already at surplusintelligence.ai
- freakynit 2mo agoThis is freaking so cool.
- kevinbaiv 2mo ago[flagged]
- alessandrobinda 2mo ago[dead]
- Naru41 2mo agoIt's fun. This new market could become a new source of funding to support the AI bubble.
- loufe 2mo agoThe comments here are baffling. Is nobody seeing the easy opportunity for gathering amazing high-quality training data by inserting yourself as a MITM? If I were a competing lab, criminal, or opportunist I'd lie/cheat/steal/simply pay the difference to get the chance to listen into real life scenarios of usage of modern models in a high-impact business. Seems a huge part of the story completely absent to me.
- kay_o 2mo agoThis is what every chinese "credit reseller" is doing, selling all the prompts and responses to labs in addition to selling quanted kimi/ds/etc as opus/fable
- yetanotherdood 2mo agoArena.AI does this as well - they may appear as a leaderboard but what keeps business booming is their sale of traces to chinese labs
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2mo agoWhat's the source of information?
- Aurornis 2mo agoThere's a strong theory with some rumors to support it that some of the largest customers of these services are labs doing distillation. The resellers are basically crowdsourcing the farming of accounts for them to use. Doing MITM on other people's sessions isn't as interesting as simply sending your own synthetic requests to the models at a 97% discount. They manufacturer the questions and responses they want to train on.
- tiffanyh 2mo agoIsn’t that essentially OpenRouter and Cursor play.
- killingtime74 2mo ago
- alekstret 2mo agoIn my project, I pay a general price for using agent quota. For me, it's not about saving money but about being sure that I have full control over the usage limits. My product provides a pool that depends on the plan (100 or 500 requests per paying account per month), and when these credits are used, I offer a backup option to bring your own AI key to use. And last but not least, I want to be sure that users' data won't be used to train models.
- LoganDark 2mo agoI wonder if any of these providers have accounts that are in the cyber verification program. I got approved into it a week or two ago and there was no actual verification and only automated review. (Claude has never asked me for identity verification or even a phone number, and the email address of the account I use is a disposable relay address... I do not understand how they trust me so much, maybe it's the age of my account and the fact that I'm paying $200 a month ??)
- freakynit 2mo agoJust fyi: Searching for "cheap AI credits" on Google returns none of these sites, or any in fact... on duckduckgo however, you get a lot of results.
- damienmeur 2mo agoI also saw some posts on linkedin of people willing to pay to use unused quota resets. Not sure is this what they meant by the great “ai wealth redistribution”. With Grok being half-priced for indian residents, I would not be shocked to see a parallel indian account resell economy coming.
- noduerme 2mo ago[dead]
- 13639366668 2mo ago[flagged]
- cdxy 2mo agoFor anyone looking to cash out unused AI credits, I'd pay 30% for Azure, 40% for GCP, 50% for OpenAI, and 65% for AWS/Anthropic.
- dabrez 2mo agoFunniest thing is I am fairly sure grey beards would be familiar with this happening during the cloud compute days, and probably during the every other days. Everyone thinks they are different when it is actually probably a better bet to be like how are we not.