Where This Started

This is a follow-up article to a piece I recently wrote about the token relay market. Noticeably absent from that piece was a mention of the rise of “token brokers” — people who buy unused credits from startups and then resell them.

I first heard about token brokers while chatting with a good friend of mine who was receiving offers for Anthropic tokens at steep discounts.

It wasn’t just him, though. As I started talking to more founders about what I was building, they said the same thing: they were getting a lot of inbound email from people looking to buy or sell off-market inference.

Startups swapping credits is nothing new, and I knew this was happening in several startup forums and groups, but this was when I realized that the market was being commercialized.

So I did what any normal person would do. I got the brokers’ email addresses and started emailing them to learn more.

Before my own outreach, it’s worth seeing what founders are actually receiving. Both of these were forwarded to me by friends.

I started by sourcing a few email addresses from friends. The first two emails I sent bounced, but the third was a hit. Here’s a screenshot of that conversation:

What’s interesting is the amount of supply. The seller was offering $100k in spend per day.

They aren’t handing out the provider keys directly; instead, they act as a proxy that probably picks from a pool of keys and forwards the request.

The Listings

Credit Marketplaces

There are a few websites promoting credit brokering as well. One of them, AI Credits, bills itself as a credit marketplace. For another flavor of the pure-play credit reseller marketplaces, take a look at AICreditMart.

These sites offer credits at most of the major cloud and inference providers.

AI Credits’ onboarding process is pretty straightforward, and you can even select your preferred delivery method as the seller.

I went ahead and listed my credits, which are still pending approval.

Bulk Discounts

Another site that I found through a friend was CheapCredits. This site positions itself as a router that is able to achieve its discounts through “bulk pricing.”

I noticed that this was a trend with a number of sites that I believe are acting as credit brokers. They present themselves as being able to offer discounts based on bulk purchases. Some other examples include Tokvana and Neokens.

Having spent time in the industry, I’d say that a 40% discount is very unlikely unless you are one of the provider’s top customers. My hunch is that CheapCredits is acquiring the supply in other ways.

CheapCredits even has a Data Processing Agreement for anyone looking to stay GDPR compliant.

The Message Boards

I checked where you’d expect to find underground marketplaces.

Telegram had a few channels, with one being relatively active.

There are also sporadic Reddit posts.

If you’ve been hanging out in any of the closed-off startup groups, I’m sure you’ve seen a number of these posts as well.

So How Big Is This Market?

My rough estimate is that, across the sites, forums, and resellers I looked at, there are probably tens of millions of these credits being offered.

Unfortunately, when you try to offer nice things, abuse isn’t far behind. Tokens have become a pseudo-currency, and there is enough liquidity in the market to allow for a lot of abuse. As we see the market turn and companies become more aware of costs, crackdowns on this type of abuse probably aren’t far behind.

Sources

Company and site names below are as they present themselves publicly. Screenshots are from my own outreach and from browsing the sites as a prospective buyer and seller.