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A no-fluff field guide to the AI token resale economy — how OpenRouter, Chinese API gateways, and One-API actually make money, and the traps that sink most of them.
I spent the last year watching a quiet corner of the AI economy: people who don’t build models, don’t ship apps, and barely write frontend code—yet they move hundreds of millions of tokens a month by sitting between upstream APIs and end users.
This guide is the field manual I wish I had when I started looking into it. It breaks down:
- How OpenRouter handles ~$100M in volume while keeping a thin 5% cut
- Why open-source gateways like One-API hit 30k+ stars with almost zero marketing spend
- The four revenue streams that actually matter: token spreads, SaaS subscriptions, enterprise installs, and vertical bundles
- The three traps that kill most relay businesses (single upstream dependency, “cheaper than official” positioning, and gray-market traffic)
It’s not a product pitch. It’s a map of a business model that’s already happening, mostly in Chinese and mostly under the radar. If you’re building in AI infra or just curious where the money actually flows, I hope it saves you a few months of digging.
Happy to answer questions here.
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About Don't Build Products, Resell AI Tokens on Product Hunt
“How middlemen quietly cash in on AI API chaos.”
Don't Build Products, Resell AI Tokens was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 3 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #159 on the daily leaderboard. A no-fluff field guide to the AI token resale economy — how OpenRouter, Chinese API gateways, and One-API actually make money, and the traps that sink most of them.
Don't Build Products, Resell AI Tokens was featured in API (98.5k followers), Developer Tools (517.5k followers), Artificial Intelligence (475.9k followers) and GitHub (41.4k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 230.6k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
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