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An Inside Look at the Token Reseller Market

43 points2 hoursvectoral.com
robluxus1 hour ago

> For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent.

Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?

mmoskal33 minutes ago

Also 425 RMB is about $59 so $1 of tokens for $0.017 not $0.13 (the discount rate quoted also seems off).

zaltekk59 minutes ago

I think this was very poorly worded. I believe they’re trying to say you pay the reseller $0.13 to get what costs $1 at the upstream provider.

mlenhard1 hour ago

Yeah, I should probably clean this up. The sentence is a bit hard to understand. What I was trying to show was the steep discounts offered by resellers.

jagged-chisel1 hour ago

So $1 of usage for $0.13?

latchkey1 hour ago

If you are using a stolen credit card to buy tokens and resell them, then the cost per token is the amount the credit card cost you (and building/running the proxy service), not the value of the tokens themselves.

hsienchuc35 minutes ago

I use both of subscription and API services. on last month, i chat with CLI and let it to do something. After that, maybe in one days pass, i received the $32 USD bill. it cause my left my API key and CLI call the API to do job not through subscription.

lmf4lol50 minutes ago

thats one of the reasons why we vest any of our new customers. We need to know you before you are allowed to use our agent system. When you have an open sign up with some free credits, all hell breaks loose.

feverzsj33 minutes ago

Token is the new cryptocurrency.

arkhiver32 minutes ago

[dead]

altmanaltman21 minutes ago

"Token reseller market" is a fancy way of saying credit card fraud. If someone stole xboxs from stores using stolen credit cards and then sold them at 10% of their price, at what point is it a "resller market" and not "criminal enterpirse"?

markus_zhang51 minutes ago

I don't know anything about tokens. Does the following argument make sense?

1. Tokens are model-specific: e.g. tokens used by Anthropic cannot be used in models of other companies.

2. Tokens are generated by GPU cards. They measure the power of GPU cards.

3. Tokens cannot be separated from the models. You sort of "connect" the software part (models) into the hardware part (GPU cards) to use the tokens generated from the hardware.

capitalsigma37 minutes ago

Tokens measure "how much work the model did" in the same way that step counts measure "how far the person went"

GPUs "generate tokens" in the same sense that human feet "generate steps"

You can't compare token counts across different providers to get an absolute measure of "total work done" for the same reason that you can't compare step counts across different people to get an absolute measure of "total distance traveled"

irishcoffee46 minutes ago

No, all 3 points are incorrect. I’m not even pro-LLM and I’ll tell you this.

You should do a bit of reading on what a token is. The short answer is that it’s a series of 2-4 bytes of information turned into an integer.

Your comparisons are akin to asking “are amazon gift cards the same as a bunch of pesos?”