Show IH: I built a Chinese AI API marketplace with 67 endpoints and x402 micropayments

Hey IH — I want to share what I've been building for the past few months.

THE PROBLEM
I'm a system integrator based in Gansu, China. My company resells cloud services to education, healthcare, and government clients across northwest China. Every time a client needed an AI feature — chatbot, OCR, translation — I had to sign up with a different provider, deal with their billing, handle their SDK, and pray the API didn't break.

The Chinese AI API landscape is fragmented: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Zhipu — each with different auth, different pricing, different rate limits. For a 6-person team, integrating 7 providers meant 7x the maintenance.

WHAT I BUILT
GoldBean API — one endpoint, one API key, 67 endpoints across 7 Chinese LLM providers. Developers get:

• Unified OpenAI-compatible interface for all providers
• Pay-per-call pricing (no monthly commitments)
• 2,000 free calls per day per IP
• x402 micropayment protocol for crypto-native payments (USDC)
• Traditional payments via PayPal and Alipay

TECH STACK

• Backend: Node.js with Express
• Frontend: Next.js playground for side-by-side model comparison
• Payments: x402 Protocol + PayPal + Alipay QR
• Infra: AlmaLinux VPS, PM2, Nginx
• Providers: DeepSeek, Doubao (ByteDance), Kimi (Moonshot), Qwen (Alibaba), Hy3 (Zhipu), GLM, Baidu

PRICING MODEL
Three tiers: Free ($0, 2,000 calls/day), Pro ($19.9/mo), Business ($89/mo). Token-based pricing for LLM endpoints ranges from $0.05/1M tokens (budget models) to $2.50/1M tokens (premium).

CURRENT STATUS

• All 7 LLM providers verified and live
• First organic API calls coming in
• Listed on Product Hunt (under review)
• MCP server published on npm (goldbean-mcp)
• Open Router integration in progress

WHAT I LEARNED

1. Developers want pricing transparency above everything. No one signs up for a $20/month plan just to test an API.
2. The Chinese AI market is huge but almost impossible to access from outside China. GoldBean bridges that gap.
3. x402 micropayments actually work for API billing — each call costs fractions of a cent and settles instantly on-chain.

WHAT'S NEXT

• Cross-provider benchmark reports (public, free)
• More non-LLM endpoints (search, translation, image generation)
• Developer community on Discord

If you're building anything with Chinese AI models, I'd love your feedback. The playground is at goldbean-api.xyz/playground — you can test all 7 models side by side without signing up.