This move by Shanghai Telecom is pretty interesting: with a 1 yuan setup, you can get a quota of 250,000. You can also charge it through your phone bill. It feels like they’re lowering the barrier for ordinary users to access large models—no need to hassle with credit cards and overseas APIs.

Shanghai Telecom announces the launch of Token computing power services for Shanghai users, becoming the first operator in Shanghai to offer Token computing power pricing.
The service provides two billing options: pay-as-you-go and on-demand discounts, with 1 yuan equivalent to 250k quota points, supporting bill payments via phone bill.
After purchase, users can access over 30 mainstream large models through standard API calls, covering text and multimodal applications.
For example, with 10 yuan, purchasing 2.5 million quota points can support the automatic summarization of approximately 100 electronic books with 100k words each.