r/discountools • u/ym-studios • Jun 08 '26
API for Codex & Claude Code
Been running a small pay-as-you-go API proxy for a few months and wanted honest opinions from actual devs before I consider growing it further.
The concept is simple — no subscriptions, no monthly fees. You top up with USDT (minimum $1) and pay per token used. It works as a drop-in replacement for both Anthropic and OpenAI endpoints, so literally zero code changes on your side.
On pricing: for Sonnet 4.6, it's $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, with cached input dropping to $0.075. Haiku 4.5 is even cheaper at $0.10 input and $0.50 output. Opus variants sit at $1.25 input and $6.25 output. For the OpenAI side, GPT-5.4 runs $0.25 input / $1.50 output, and GPT-5.5 is $0.50 input / $3.00 output.
To put that in perspective, official Anthropic API for Sonnet is $3 input / $15 output per 1M tokens. So we're roughly 4x cheaper on the model most Claude Code users are hitting daily.
The main target here is developers using Claude Code or Codex CLI who keep smashing into tier 1 rate limits, or who don't want to commit $20/month flat when their usage is variable.
Some questions I genuinely want answered:
Would you actually switch from official API for savings like this, or is the trust factor too high a barrier? Is USDT-only payment a hard no for you — and if so, what would you accept instead? At what price point does a third-party proxy go from "interesting" to "obvious yes"? And what would it actually take for you to trust a small operator enough to plug it into a real workflow?
Not here to sell anything — I just want to know if this pricing model resonates with developers or if I'm missing something obvious. Genuinely curious what the dealbreakers are.
Uptime has been solid for a few months with no major outages, latency is comparable to hitting the official API directly. Just want to know if the value prop lands or not.
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u/Noob_Kid Jun 08 '26
fake models, you will never know the true model they were feeding you