🚀 With China’s AI price war hitting 99% off this week, here is how global Indie Hackers can exploit it (Free Tokens Inside)

Hey Indie Hackers,

If you’ve been following the AI news this week, you probably noticed that the price war among Chinese LLM providers just went nuclear.

Tencent and Xiaomi just announced a massive permanent price cut for their latest models (DeepSeek-V4 & MiMo-V2.5), with some drops up to 97.5% - 99%. Right now, China-based models like DeepSeek-V4 and Qwen-2.5 are offering performance close to GPT-4o but at a fraction of a fraction of the cost (we are talking about $0.02 to $0.14 per million tokens).

For bootstrapped founders like us, this is a goldmine for lowering our background processing, embedding, and translation costs.

However, as a global developer, trying to use these Chinese models directly is a huge pain in the a:

❌ You need a Chinese phone number to register.

❌ You need WeChat Pay or Alipay to top up.

❌ Dealing with fragmented documentation and API formats across 5 different platforms.

To solve this for my own projects and for the community, I built PandasRouter — a unified, high-performance API proxy designed to bring all top-tier Chinese and global AI models to your stack seamlessly.

🌟 Why we built PandasRouter:
Unrestricted Access to All Chinese Models 🇨🇳
Get instant access to DeepSeek-V4, Qwen-2.5, Ernie, and Baichuan, alongside global giants like Claude 3.5 and Gemini. No Chinese ID, no phone verification, no geo-blocks.

One API Unified Format 🛠️
Fully OpenAI-compatible. You only need to change your baseURL and apiKey, and you can switch between Qwen and Claude with a single line of code.

The Absolute Lowest Cost (We pass the price cuts to you) 💰
We synchronized this week’s massive price cuts instantly. If you are running high-volume AI tasks (like data scraping, agent workflows, or long-form content generation), switching your backend to our routed Chinese models will cut your API bill by up to 80%.

🎁 Exclusive for Indie Hackers: Free Tokens to Start
We don't want you to take our word for it. We want you to test the latency and output yourself.

No credit card required.

Simply sign up at https://pandasrouter.com/ and you will get free welcome tokens credited into your account instantly to test any model you want.

Whether you want to optimize your burn rate or build a multi-model fallback system, give it a spin. I'll be hanging out in the comments below — would love to hear your feedback on the latency and how you guys are leveraging these ultra-cheap models in your SaaS!