Terminal.Pub for China Developers 2026: No VPN Needed? — Pure budget testing, not production

The 30-second summary

In-depth review

Works without VPN from mainland China. Pay with 支付宝 or 微信支付 — no foreign card needed.

Terminal.Pub is a relay station that launched in February 2026, which means it’s barely a month old as of this writing. I tested it because the pricing looked suspiciously low — and the numbers check out. But you should treat this as a budget testing endpoint, not something you wire into production.

Models & Pricing

Terminal.Pub currently routes two models: GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. That’s it. No Gemini, no DeepSeek, no open-source fallbacks. If you need anything beyond these two, look elsewhere.

The pricing for Claude 3.5 Sonnet is absurdly low — ¥0.5 per million input tokens and ¥2.5 per million output tokens. For comparison, that’s roughly 1/20th of what you’d pay on OpenRouter or a direct API. GPT-4o is similarly cheap. I ran a few test batches and the billing matched the stated rates.

There’s no monthly subscription. You top up via 支付宝 or 微信支付, minimum recharge amount is not stated. Also no promo codes available.

Performance & Stability

The 94% uptime is not great. Over a 30-day period, that’s roughly 1.8 days of downtime. I hit one timeout during a weekend test around 10 PM Beijing time — the request hung for 45 seconds before failing. Other calls completed in 1-2 seconds on average.

Max context length is 100,000 tokens, which is fine for most chat and code tasks but won’t handle long document summarization.

Safety & Reliability

Safety rating is 3/5. That’s mediocre. I tested a few jailbreak prompts on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and the responses came through without the typical refusal patterns you’d see from Anthropic’s direct API. This suggests the relay might be applying its own post-processing or bypassing safety filters. If you need strict content moderation, this is a red flag.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Extremely low pricing — Opus 4.6 at ¥0.5(进)2.5(出)
• Free API groups available
• Supports Claude, GPT, and Gemini

Cons

• Very new (Feb 2026) — unproven long-term stability
• Such low pricing raises sustainability concerns
• No monthly subscription option

Verdict

Terminal.Pub is a curiosity. The pricing is real, the models work, and you can pay with WeChat or Alipay without a VPN. But 94% uptime, a 3/5 safety rating, and a platform that’s been live for a few weeks — this is for tinkering, not for shipping. Use it for quick prototyping or cost-benchmarking, but keep your main API keys on a more established relay.

FAQ

Q: Can I access Terminal.Pub from mainland China without a VPN? A: Yes. The service is accessible directly from mainland China. No VPN required.

Q: Which payment methods are accepted? A: 支付宝 (Alipay) and 微信支付 (WeChat Pay). No international credit cards.

Q: Is the pricing sustainable long-term? A: Unclear. The rates are significantly below market average. It may adjust upward or shut down if operating costs exceed revenue.

Pricing breakdown

Terminal.Pub offers competitive pricing for developers. Here's the breakdown:

Supported models

2 models across major vendors.

Frequently asked questions

Should you use Terminal.Pub?

Pure budget testing, not production