Most AI API gateways charge a platform fee. OpenRouter takes 5.5% on every credit purchase. Together AI marks up some models by 11x the provider price. These fees look small on paper — until you do the annual math.
Let's say you're an indie developer running a chatbot SaaS. You process 200 million tokens per month on DeepSeek V4 Pro (128K context, $0.28/1M input, $0.40/1M output). Here's your actual annual cost on each platform:
| Platform | Input Price/1M | Output Price/1M | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NovAI | $0.28 | $0.40 | $68 | $816 |
| DeepSeek Direct (discount) | $0.435 | $0.87 | $130 | $1,565 |
| OpenRouter (est. 5.5% fee) | ~$0.46 | ~$0.92 | $138 | $1,656 |
| Together AI | $2.10 | $4.40 | $650 | $7,800 |
That's a $6,984/year difference between NovAI and Together AI for the exact same model. Not a typo.
Most aggregators don't advertise their markup as a separate line item. It's baked into the per-token price. Here's what each platform actually charges:
| Platform | Fee Model | DeepSeek V4 Pro Cost/1M output | vs NovAI Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| NovAI | Zero platform fee | $0.40 | 1x |
| DeepSeek Direct | No fee (but China phone required) | $0.87 (discount ends May 31) | 2.2x |
| OpenRouter | 5.5% on credit purchases | ~$0.92 (estimated) | 2.3x |
| Together AI | Infrastructure markup | $4.40 | 11x |
OpenRouter's 5.5% sounds small. But on $500/month spend, that's $27.50/month — $330/year just to route API calls. For a startup burning $2,000/month on AI inference, that's $1,320/year in pure routing fees.
Together AI's pricing is a different story entirely. They position as an "AI Acceleration Cloud" — you're paying for their GPU infrastructure, FlashAttention-4 optimizations, and enterprise support. But if all you need is API access to DeepSeek models, you're overpaying by 11x.
Three structural reasons:
Our servers are in Hong Kong with direct network peering to mainland China AI providers (DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Zhipu GLM, ByteDance Doubao). This means 30-50ms latency to Chinese model providers — no expensive global routing needed. US-based gateways pay more for cross-Pacific bandwidth.
$2 credit for new users · No card required · OpenAI-compatible API
We buy tokens in bulk from Chinese model providers at wholesale rates. Unlike consumer-oriented markups, our model price is often below the provider's public API price. DeepSeek V4 Pro: $0.28/1M on NovAI vs $0.435/1M direct (during their 75% off period).
No sales team. No GPU clusters to maintain. No research papers to publish. We're a thin gateway layer — pass through the models, handle billing, keep costs near zero. Our overhead is email support and server maintenance.
For a realistic workload — 100M input + 100M output tokens per month on DeepSeek V4 Pro:
| Platform | Monthly | Annual | 5-Year TCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| NovAI | $68 | $816 | $4,080 |
| DeepSeek Direct (post-discount, June 1) | $522 | $6,264 | $31,320 |
| OpenRouter | $102 | $1,224 | $6,120 |
| Together AI | $650 | $7,800 | $39,000 |
DeepSeek Direct pricing reflects post-May 31 rates when the 75% discount expires. Current discount: $0.435/$0.87.
NovAI offers GLM-4.6V-Flash completely free (20 req/min, 128K context, supports vision). No credit card needed. This isn't a trial — it's free forever. Compare:
Honest answer: latency. Our Hong Kong location means US/EU developers experience 500-700ms total round-trip time (vs 150-250ms for US-hosted APIs). For real-time chat applications, this is noticeable. For batch processing, content generation, data analysis, and RAG pipelines — totally fine.
We're transparent about this tradeoff. If you need sub-200ms latency, use a US-hosted provider. If you're optimizing for cost (80%+ savings), NovAI is hard to beat.
DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.28/1M. Zero platform fee. USDT (TRC20).
→ Get API Key FreePrice data source: DeepSeek API docs (api-docs.deepseek.com), Together AI pricing (together.ai/pricing), OpenRouter FAQ (openrouter.ai/docs/faq), Anthropic docs (platform.gpt.com). Prices as of May 18, 2026. DeepSeek 75% discount expires May 31, 2026.
OpenAI-compatible API — just change base_url and your API key