01.AI's Yi API collapses to two routed SKUs — yi-lightning ¥0.99/1M and yi-vision-v2 ¥6/1M
01.AI's public rate card dropped from seven priced SKUs to two — yi-lightning (¥0.99/1M tokens) and yi-vision-v2 (¥6/1M) — with no surviving rate changed. Both are now intelligently routed to DeepSeek and Qwen models behind a fixed price.
A seven-SKU public card at platform.lingyiwanwu.com/docs: Yi-Large ¥20/1M, Yi-Large-Turbo ¥25, Yi-Medium-200K ¥12, Yi-Medium ¥2.5, Yi-Vision ¥6, Yi-Spark ¥1 and Yi-Lightning ¥0.99 (archived 2024-12-02).
Two SKUs on the same public card: yi-lightning ¥0.99/1M and yi-vision-v2 ¥6/1M, both 16K context, billed on input + output tokens combined, funded from a prepaid balance (¥36 credit on signup, 20%+ bonus on any top-up).
01.AI’s developer platform quietly shrank its RMB rate card between 2 December 2024 and 22 January 2025. Only two SKUs survive — yi-lightning at ¥0.99 per 1M tokens and yi-vision-v2 at ¥6 per 1M tokens, both with a 16K context window. Yi-Large (¥20/1M), Yi-Large-Turbo (¥25), Yi-Medium-200K (¥12), Yi-Medium (¥2.5) and Yi-Spark (¥1) disappeared from the card entirely.
Note what did not happen: no surviving rate moved. Yi-Lightning has held ¥0.99 since the October 2024 price war, and ¥6 was already the vision price in 2024. This is a packaging deletion, not a repricing — and the card itself never stopped rendering publicly. Archive snapshots show it readable without a login on every capture from January 2025 through July 2026, with byte-identical content since September 2025.
The more interesting mechanic arrived later. A platform notice dated 7 August 2025 states that both endpoints became intelligent routing services: the platform reads the request and dispatches it to DeepSeek-V3, Qwen3-30B-A3B or Yi-Lightning (text), or Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct or Yi-Vision-V2 (vision), “to provide better value for money.” The buyer pays one fixed per-token rate regardless of which model answers — so the branded SKU became a price/latency envelope rather than a set of weights.
Access is prepaid rather than subscribed: new accounts receive ¥36 of cash credit, any top-up carries a bonus of 20% or more and, under the current promotion, lifts the account straight to rate-limit Tier 3. Tiers govern throughput only — 10 RPM / 80,000 TPM at Free, up to 200 RPM / 400,000 TPM at Tier 5 on yi-lightning — and are bought with cumulative top-up at ¥500 (Tier 2), ¥2,000 (Tier 3), ¥10,000 (Tier 4) and ¥100,000 (Tier 5). The token rate is identical at every tier.
Dating note: this event was originally logged on 2026-07-22, the date the corpus first captured the card. Independent archive snapshots place the actual change 18 months earlier; the entry has been re-dated to the first date the two-SKU card is observed.
Between 2 December 2024 and 22 January 2025 the public docs billing card drops from seven priced SKUs — Yi-Large ¥20/1M, Yi-Large-Turbo ¥25, Yi-Medium-200K ¥12, Yi-Medium ¥2.5, Yi-Vision ¥6, Yi-Spark ¥1 and Yi-Lightning ¥0.99 — to just two: yi-lightning at ¥0.99/1M and yi-vision-v2 at ¥6/1M. No surviving rate moved; the ladder around them was deleted. The card kept rendering publicly without a login throughout. (Source: platform.lingyiwanwu.com/docs, Wayback snapshots 2024-12-02 and 2025-01-22.)