I Stumbled Into a 40x Cost Reduction by Switching to Chinese AI Models

Look, I didn't plan this. I was building a side project — an AI writing assistant for my blog — and my OpenAI bill was $300/month before I even launched. For a side project with zero users. That's insane. So I got curious. What else is out there? And honestly? The answer surprised me. What I Found Chinese AI models in 2026 are matching GPT-4o quality on most benchmarks but costing 5-40x less: What I need GPT-4o cost Chinese model Cost Blog writing $10.00/M DeepSeek V4 Flash...