Chinese LLMs Are Ridiculously Cheap — Why Aren't More Developers Using Them?

I've been experimenting with Chinese LLMs recently and the pricing caught me off guard:

That's 8-20x cheaper than GPT-4o depending on the model.

What's the Catch?

From my experience, the main barriers for non-Chinese developers are:

1. Payment — Most providers only accept Alipay/WeChat Pay
2. Documentation — English docs are limited or missing
3. API compatibility — Each provider has its own format
4. Trust — Concerns about data handling and compliance

Quality-wise?

I've been running side-by-side tests. For general tasks (chat, summarization, code assistance), DeepSeek and Qwen hold up surprisingly well. They're not beating GPT-4o on everything, but for the price? Hard to ignore.

I'm Curious

For those of you who have tried Chinese LLMs — what was your experience? And for those who haven't, what's holding you back?

Would love to hear different perspectives in the comments.