Chinese labs cut LLM API prices six times in the first half of 2026, and three of those cuts were declared permanent. DeepSeek V4-Pro now costs $0.87 per million output tokens. Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 flattened its long-context tier to $3 output. Alibaba’s Qwen3 Max ships at $3.90. Moonshot’s Kimi K2.6 holds the cache-hit floor at $0.07. Zhipu’s GLM-5 sits at $3.20 output. Use this breakdown to choose, test, and route workloads across the top five Chinese frontier APIs in May 2026.
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TL;DR
Cheapest output tokens: DeepSeek V4-Pro at $0.87/MTok, roughly 34x below GPT-5.5.
Cheapest 1M-context option: Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 Pro at $3/MTok output, flat across input length.
