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I think this was very poorly worded. I believe they’re trying to say you pay the reseller $0.13 to get what costs $1 at the upstream provider.

Also 425 RMB is about $59 so $1 of tokens for $0.017 not $0.13 (the discount rate quoted also seems off).

seems like they missed a zero somewhere. its a dollar of usage for a penny and change.

If you are using a stolen credit card to buy tokens and resell them, then the cost per token is the amount the credit card cost you (and building/running the proxy service), not the value of the tokens themselves.

Yeah, I should probably clean this up. The sentence is a bit hard to understand. What I was trying to show was the steep discounts offered by resellers.

So $1 of usage for $0.13?

That sounds entirely plausible. When I was on the Claude Max $100 plan, I would often get the equivalent of at least $1300 API usage, according to the costs counter in Claude Code. That would be about $1 of usage for every $0.075c.

At $1 of usage for $0.13, the reseller is making a tidy profit on top of whatever subscriptions they're reselling.