Is ClaudeAPI.cheap legit?
Twelve direct answers.

No. It is a Claude API proxy that resells access to actual Anthropic Claude models at a discount. Every request hits the real Claude weights and returns the real response — verified by side-by-side parity benchmarks against Anthropic Direct, posted weekly on /trust. The discount comes from aggregating developer demand into volume rates, not from substituting cheaper or quantized models.

Public Anthropic prices are retail rates. Volume buyers — large platforms, enterprise customers — pay materially less per token. ClaudeAPI.cheap aggregates many small developers into one large volume buyer and shares the savings. The fundamental cost of inference is well below list price; the gap is where the discount comes from.

No. Every request hits full-precision Claude Opus, Sonnet, or Haiku — whichever model ID you specified. We publish weekly parity benchmarks running fixed prompts through both us and Anthropic Direct, comparing token-by-token output. If we ever quantized, the diff would be visible immediately and our customers would leave. You can run your own parity test in 30 seconds using the steps on /migrate/anthropic-direct-to-claudeapi-cheap.

Two safety nets. First, a full refund policy: email support within 7 days of any top-up and remaining balance returns to your originating crypto wallet within 24 hours. Second, we publish 99.5% uptime SLA tracked on a third-party Instatus page that updates in real time. If the page ever goes dark you would see it before depositing more. Crypto-prepaid model also means there is no card-on-file to drain — your maximum exposure is whatever you topped up.

It is the opposite of a red flag for this specific risk: crypto-prepaid means there is no card-on-file auto-charge to surprise you. A runaway loop or accidental high-volume call hits a hard balance ceiling, not your credit card limit. Many scaling teams treat us as cost-insurance even before they care about the discount. The reason we cannot accept cards is regulatory — international card processing for a niche reseller is expensive and slow; crypto rails are not.

Support emails go to a real person — no chatbot escalation gate, no auto-close after 7 days. Most replies inside 6 hours during business hours, all replies within 24h on business days. Pro users get priority routing. The email is support@claudeapi.cheap and it is monitored.

Prompt and completion content are not stored. We log request metadata for billing and abuse detection: timestamp, token count, model used, latency, status code. Full privacy policy at /privacy. The proxy forwards your request to the upstream Claude model and the response back — your application sees the same data Anthropic Direct would have returned.

Honest answer: that is the founder's brand-positioning choice, and we agree it is a tradeoff. 'Cheap' captures the search intent of developers who are exactly trying to cut their Claude bill. The downside is the connotation with low-quality aggregators. We counter that with everything else on /trust — public SLA, refund policy, named human support, no quantization commitment, weekly parity benchmarks. The name is a hook; the product has to back it up, and it does.

ClaudeAPI.cheap is operated as a small independent service. We do not surface upstream vendor relationships because those are confidential business agreements (standard for reseller arrangements across SaaS). What we do surface publicly: SLA terms, refund policy, status page, all linked from /trust. If you need a formal vendor questionnaire answered for procurement, email support@claudeapi.cheap with your form.

Two hedges. First, we are multi-vendor — the same API key works for Claude, GPT-5 (OpenAI), and Gemini 3 (Google). If Anthropic ever tightens reseller terms beyond what we can absorb, GPT-5 and Gemini 3 traffic continues unaffected. Second, in that scenario all balances remain refundable for 7 days from notification, and we would communicate the timeline transparently. The risk is real and we account for it — multi-vendor positioning was a Day-1 decision specifically because of it.

Yes. The Basic plan is free forever at 50% off Anthropic list. No credit card required, no email verification ladder, no time-limited trial. Generate an sk-cc-* key from the dashboard, swap your ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, run real traffic for a week, decide. The 50% off Basic tier is structured exactly so you can de-risk before upgrading to Pro.

Skepticism is the right starting point for any unknown infrastructure. The honest move is to run a small workload — even $1 of crypto — through Basic for a week, run a parity test against Anthropic Direct, and check the dashboard logs. If anything looks off, request a refund. That sequence costs you under $5 and 30 minutes and gives you first-hand data instead of opinions.