The 2026 Chinese LLM Price War: Top 5 Frontier API Costs Compared (opens in new tab)

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. Try Apidog today ...