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: Model Input (per 1M tokens) Output (per 1M tokens) GPT-4o $2.50 $10.00 DeepSeek V4 $0.30 $0.50 Qwen3.5-Plus $0.11 $0.67 Qwen-Long $0.07 $0.28 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: Payment — Most providers only accept Alipay/WeChat Pay Documentation — English docs are limited or missing API compatibility