I Spent a Month Testing Chinese AI APIs — Here's What Actually Wins

I gotta say, i Spent a Month Testing Chinese AI APIs — Here's What Actually Wins

Look, I'm just an indie hacker trying to ship products without going broke. For the past month I've been obsessively running the four biggest Chinese AI model families — DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM — through every test I could think of. And honestly? I wish someone had given me a breakdown like this before I started.

So here's my attempt. No corporate fluff, no hand-wavy "it depends" answers. Just real data from someone who actually pays these bills.

Why I Even Started Looking at Chinese Models

Honestly, I was a GPT-4o loyalist for the longest time. Then I saw my December API bill and nearly choked. $400+ for what amounted to a few chatbot features and some content generation. That's when a friend told me to check out DeepSeek and Qwen.