How to Choose a Good AI Relay Service
When choosing an AI relay service, consider multiple factors—including the operator's integrity, the site's scale, stability, and pricing—before making a decision.
How to Choose a Good AI Relay Service
In this article, we will only discuss how to choose an AI relay service.
Choose a Relay Service or Subscribe Officially?
Choosing a good AI relay service is not actually easy.
If you are willing to tinker with things yourself, you can purchase an official account and subscribe directly. This should currently be a relatively good option.
However, this option has two drawbacks:
- Subscription accounts are either easily banned or difficult to obtain.
- AI releases a new model every so often. GPT-5.6 may be useful today, while K3 might be more powerful tomorrow, so you need to switch between models frequently.
Therefore, a better approach is to have some basic subscriptions, supplemented by a powerful AI relay service.
What Metrics Should You Look at for a Relay Service?
The Integrity of the Operator/Relay Service
At this stage (2026), AI relay services are still in their early days, and many sites are operated by small teams. Under these circumstances, the integrity of the team—especially the operator—is particularly important. Some operators like to take petty advantages, while others are overly stingy. These traits will show in how they treat customers.
Therefore, be sure to stay away from sites that simply feel wrong. Some characteristics can reveal the operator's nature, for example:
Also, relay services carry a risk of disappearing. Even long-running sites may shut down and disappear, so it is best to choose sites that support real-name verification or have ICP registration. At least that makes it less easy for them to disappear.
Site Scale
As mentioned earlier, AI models are evolving rapidly, so you definitely need a site with a wider range of models, allowing you to switch between them. It should also add new models quickly.
Stability
Coding models are updated quickly, and naturally everyone wants to use a new version as soon as it is released. However, when a relay service has just connected a new route, it may also be in a period of frequent adjustments.
A first-token delay of a few seconds during chat is usually just a poor experience. But when writing code, if an API connection drops while executing a long goal, it may mean wasting a great deal of time.
Therefore, stability may be the most important factor when selecting a site.
Pricing & Adulteration
Pricing and adulteration are generally discussed together.
Models are available through many channels, and channel quality varies widely. For example, for some sites, their Claude Max channel capacity may be insufficient, so they temporarily use a Kiro channel to fill the gap. After this kind of adulteration, prices may be significantly lower.
Some sites even use DeepSeek Flash to adulterate other models in pursuit of huge profits.
Therefore, on the one hand, do not choose sites/channels that are excessively cheap. On the other hand, you should continuously monitor their adulteration rate. It is necessary to choose a channel that can be continuously monitored by Hvoy.
In addition, token usage, cache pricing, and cache hit rates are all important factors affecting price and should also be taken into consideration.
Service
Service includes many things, such as customer support response speed, the activity level of QQ groups, whether refunds are available, whether invoices can be issued, and so on. All of these need to be considered together.
Summary
A good AI relay service can save you a lot of effort. We recommend choosing one of the highly ranked sites on Hvoy AI, personally trying it out with a small amount first, and then using it with confidence~