Here is a number that does not make sense: $3,333 worth of official Anthropic API credit, sold for 425 RMB. That is roughly $59.
This is not a group-buy discount or a startup perk. It is the relay market, a four-layer underground economy that has grown around AI API tokens, and it is bigger and more organized than most developers realize.
What Is a Relay?
A relay -- also called a "transfer station" in the Chinese-language forums where this economy operates -- is a service that proxies API traffic to US-hosted AI models at a deep discount. You point your OpenAI-compatible SDK at the relay's endpoint instead of the official one, and your requests get forwarded through a pool of accounts the relay operator controls.
I run a personal AI agent infrastructure using Hermes Agent with multiple provider backends, including Anthropic and OpenAI APIs directly. When I first read about the relay market, my reaction was not moral outrage -- it was curiosity about the economics. How do you build a business model around something that should not work? The answer, it turns out, involves a surprisingly sophisticated supply chain.
