---
title: "How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China"
description: "Zilan Qian maps the Chinese proxy market selling Claude at a fraction of its official price by stacking arbitrage, fraud, model substitution, and log resale."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "link"
published_at: "2026-05-20"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/20/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in-china"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/20/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in-china.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/20/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in-china"
external_url: "https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in"
---

# [How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China](<https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in>)

> Users are simultaneously paying customers and unpaid data producers, selling their private data to
> proxy operators in exchange for a low price.

Qian explains how Claude tokens can sell for ten percent of the official price: harvested account
credits, shared subscriptions, fraudulent cards, silent model swaps, and the resale of prompts and
responses. The interesting part is not that a grey market evades Anthropic’s controls. It is what
the price reveals. If inference is sold below cost, the missing margin has to come from somewhere:
subsidy, deception, or another product.

Cheap tokens are not necessarily cheap. Sometimes the balance is paid in prompts, source code, and
credentials.