Alibaba killed the $3/month Lite tier in March after users were Sybil-farming accounts to pool token allocations and resell as budget API proxies — basically airdrop farming but for inference credits. Now the OAuth free tier is gone too, leaving a 16x price gap straight to Pro at $50/month with no middle ground. Pushing displaced devs toward OpenRouter effectively outsources the subsidy burden to third-party providers while Alibaba keeps the model moat and goes margins-first. "Open weights" increasingly just means "open to self-host if you can afford the H100s."

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