@levelsio Explains Why AI API Resellers Exist

Scale, filters and one bill.

Resellers usually win on economies of scale with volume deals, @levelsio writes. They get so many customers with so many jobs that they can negotiate a lower price.

That is only “kind of” true, he says, because many models are proprietary and you cannot get them cheaper elsewhere. Seedance 2.5, the best video model out there now, is hosted on ByteDance’s servers, he believes, so everyone resells API access to it. ByteDance lets some providers be less strict with content filters, so a cheaper reseller might block half your generations.

The real economic reason, he says: he does not want to pay a company in China with a Chinese bank account, and the same with 20 other models, or sign up for a new API every time a model ships. He wrote it in the context of startups that compete as APIs, like Replicate and FAL.