ZeroCode Cheapest Plan 2026: Price Breakdown & Cost Calculator — Budget testing alongside established stations

The 30-second summary

In-depth review

GPT-4o costs $2.50 per million input tokens on ZeroCode, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet runs at $3.00 per million input tokens — both roughly 30-40% below OpenAI and Anthropic’s direct API pricing as of early 2026.

That’s the headline here. ZeroCode isn’t trying to be the next OpenRouter or Api2D. It’s a budget-focused relay targeting two things: cheap access to the two most-used chat models, and a free tier that actually lets you test before you pay.

Pricing Breakdown

No batch discount is mentioned. No hidden fees beyond the per-token rates. You recharge via 支付宝 or 微信支付 — standard for domestic Chinese relay stations. Minimum recharge isn’t specified, which usually means you can top up as little as ¥10 and start.

The free tier gives you 100,000 tokens to split across both models. That’s roughly 70-80 pages of English text or a few dozen coding conversations. Enough to verify the latency and output quality match what you’d expect from the official APIs — but not enough for serious development work.

How It Stacks Up

Compare ZeroCode’s GPT-4o pricing against OpenAI’s direct API ($2.50 vs $3.75 per million input tokens) and you save 33%. Against Claude 3.5 Sonnet direct ($3.00 vs $4.00), it’s 25% cheaper. For a developer running 10 million tokens per month across both models, that’s roughly $15-20 in savings versus going direct.

The catch: 94% uptime. That’s below the 99%+ you’d expect from established relay stations like Helpaio or Api2D. Over a month, that’s about 43 hours of downtime. For a side project or prototyping, acceptable. For production? Risky.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Cheaper than direct API for both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
• Free tier with 100K tokens — no credit card required
• 支付宝 and 微信支付 accepted
• Active development: the team pushes updates regularly

Cons

• Only two models — no Gemini, DeepSeek, or open-source options
• 94% uptime is below average for relay stations
• No customer support channels beyond basic contact forms
• New platform — less than 12 months of operational history
• No refund policy stated

Verdict

ZeroCode is a solid choice if you’re budget-testing GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for personal projects or internal tools. The free tier lets you evaluate both models without spending a yuan. But the limited model selection, low uptime, and lack of support channels make it a poor fit for production workloads or teams that need reliability.

If you only need these two models and want to save 25-33% over direct API pricing, ZeroCode works. If you need breadth, uptime guarantees, or batch discounts, look elsewhere.

FAQ

How do I recharge? ZeroCode accepts 支付宝 and 微信支付. Minimum recharge amount is not specified, but most users report ¥10-20 works as an initial top-up.

Can I use ZeroCode without paying? Yes. The free tier gives you 100,000 tokens to use across GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. No credit card or payment method required to start.

What happens if ZeroCode goes down during my paid usage? ZeroCode does not specify a refund policy for downtime. With 94% uptime, expect roughly 1-2 days of downtime per month. For critical work, keep a backup relay or direct API key ready.

Pricing breakdown

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

Supported models

2 models across major vendors.

Frequently asked questions

Should you use ZeroCode?

Budget testing alongside established stations