The questions developers ask before they sign up.
Why should I buy from you when I can register on OpenAI / Anthropic / DeepSeek directly? +
You can — and you should, if you only ever need one model for one type of task. But if you're shipping a product, you'll quickly run into three problems a single-vendor account doesn't solve: (1) you don't know which model is right for each request, so you over-spend by sending simple chat to a flagship and over-pay for code generation by sending it to a chat model. (2) Every provider has outages. One rate-limit event takes your product down. (3) Every provider has its own billing relationship, its own account, its own ToS to read. HOUJIAYAN's smart routing handles all three: the gateway picks the right model for each request, fails over when one provider hiccups, and gives you one bill, one dashboard, one ToS.
What does "smart routing" actually mean? What does the gateway do that I can't do myself? +
In principle, you could write the same logic in your application: classify the request, look up which model is cheapest, send the request, retry on failure. In practice, you don't — because it's a few weeks of work, you have to maintain it as providers change pricing, and you'd be re-inventing the wheel every time a new model launches. We do that work once, on the gateway, and pass the savings through. The same request that costs you $0.50 calling a flagship directly costs $0.12 routed through us, because we send simple text to a cheap model and code to a strong one. The gateway's response always includes `routing_decision`, so you can audit every call.
I want to pick the model myself. Can I still do that? +
Yes — `model: "deepseek-v4-pro"` or any of the other 10 model IDs still works exactly like a normal OpenAI request. Smart routing is opt-in via `model: "auto"`. You can mix: pin specific models for specific endpoints in production, use `auto` for the long-tail workloads where you don't want to think about it.
Are you just reselling keys? What's the markup? +
We're a technical-integration layer, not a reseller. Models are billed per token (input and output priced separately) at the upstream official list price — zero token markup; at top-up, a payment-channel service fee is added on top: 5.0% for crypto, 5.5% for non-crypto payments. Top up ¥100 and exactly ¥100 lands in your balance — you pay ¥105.00 via crypto or ¥105.50 via non-crypto at checkout. That fee covers the actual work: NewAPI hosting, Cloudflare Tunnel bandwidth, the engineer who answers your support email, and the cron jobs that back up the database hourly. No hidden fees, no minimum top-up, no per-seat charges. Detailed per-model rate sheet is published and updated monthly.
Which providers do you actually aggregate? +
Five PRC-licensed model providers: DeepSeek (v4-flash and v4-pro), Alibaba Qwen (qwen3.7-max, qwen3.7-max-us, qwen3.7-plus, qwen3.7-plus-us, qwen3.6-max-preview, qwen3.6-plus, qwen3.5-ocr), MiniMax (M3, M2.7), Volcengine Ark (doubao-seed-code), and Moonshot Kimi (kimi-k3, kimi-k2.7-code, kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed, kimi-k2.6). Sixteen models in total. We do not proxy OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google — the international column on our pricing comparison table is there for reference, not because the gateway routes to them.
Do you store my prompts or completions? +
No. Prompts and completions are passed through in real time for inference and never logged or stored on our side. We log request metadata only — timestamp, model name, token count, HTTP status — for billing, rate limiting, and abuse prevention, retained for 90 days and then aggregated into anonymous statistics. See the API Privacy Notice for the full data handling.
Is there an SLA? What happens when something is down? +
We target 99% monthly availability at the public endpoint, measured on the public status page. Multi-upstream routing means individual provider outages rarely translate into user-visible downtime — if DeepSeek rate-limits you, the request lands on Qwen transparently. If you need 99.9% with formal credit terms, that's a separate enterprise conversation.
How do I pay? +
Self-serve registration gives you 100,000 free credits — about $1 of inference, enough to run a small prototype. When you need more, top up online in Console → Wallet: WeChat Pay or USDT-TRC20, credited instantly after payment confirmation.