Where LaoZhang.ai fits
LaoZhang.ai has built real trust with Chinese-speaking developers: deep discounts, payment rails that work in China, responsive group support, and a blog that answers almost every pricing/how-to question in the space. For an individual developer in that ecosystem who wants the lowest headline price and reads the docs in Chinese, it is a natural pick.
Where Kunavo wins
Kunavo is built to be auditable and global. The catalog is public — every model's per-1M-token USD rate sits next to the provider's official price, so procurement can verify the 30–70% discount without joining a chat group. Billing is Stripe-native with local methods (Pix, WeChat Pay, Apple Pay, ACH) and real invoices; failed requests are never billed; Claude runs on the native Anthropic Messages API as well as the OpenAI-compatible endpoint; and the same key generates images, video and music. For a team that needs compliance-friendly payments and predictable token economics, that package is the differentiator.
How to pick
Pick LaoZhang.ai if you operate in the Chinese-speaking ecosystem, want the most aggressive headline discount, and are comfortable with relay-style operations. Pick Kunavo if you want a published catalog you can audit, Stripe billing your finance team accepts, the native Anthropic API, and multimodal generation on one wallet. Either way, both are OpenAI-compatible — switching later is a base_url change, so start with the one whose billing story matches your team.
How you pay: LaoZhang.ai vs Kunavo
For a buyer in the Chinese market this is often the section that decides it, and the two products answer it very differently. Kunavo's checkout is Stripe-native, so the list follows the buyer rather than our billing country: cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, JCB, UnionPay) and Apple Pay everywhere Stripe reaches, Link and Cash App Pay for one-tap repeat top-ups, Klarna and Amazon Pay, ACH bank transfer for US accounts, and Alipay and WeChat Pay for mainland China. Local rails appear by country — Pix in Brazil, Bancontact in Belgium, BLIK in Poland, EPS in Austria, MB WAY in Portugal — with Stripe converting the dollar amount into local currency on the checkout page, so a Brazilian buyer scans a Pix QR code for an amount in reais instead of hunting for a card cleared for international purchases. LaoZhang.ai states outright that it does not list payment methods publicly: its FAQ asks you to contact support first to confirm account type and payment arrangement, and the Chinese version adds that payment details are not disclosed on the site for security reasons. That works for a negotiated business account. It does not work for a developer who wants to put $10 in at two in the morning. Kunavo's WeChat Pay and Alipay run through the same Stripe checkout as everything else — visible before you sign up, and the receipt is an ordinary Stripe one.