Being a Token Scalper for Half a Year: Returns Are Worse Than Just Getting a Job

A Chinese AI proxy service operator open-sourced their setup process, revealing high costs for compliant accounts, out-of-control price wars, and how major players use ecosystem subsidies to harvest the market, making it difficult for individuals to profit from price spreads. (Context: A Taichung buffet restaurant used AI checkout to stop being "ripped off"; the owner says customer complaints dropped by 90%) (Background: Why I say "AI will massively take away human jobs" is a fantasy) Considering time costs, the return on investment for running a proxy service is worse than just getting a regular job. A few days ago, Sukie open-sourced the entire setup process for her proxy service, writing a comprehensive tutorial covering everything from server procurement and technical configuration to marketing and user acquisition. This post brought her dozens of new users on social media in a single day. We found Sukie and wanted to chat with her about what she sees after truly working in this business, and how it differs from the outside perspective. The proxy service track has gone through a complete cycle over the past year, from quiet profit-making to cutthroat competition, and finally to big players entering to harvest the market. Dongcha Beating previously reported on Mo, a station master who only serves B-end clients, in "Reflections of a Proxy Station Master After Claude Required Real-Name Verification." Her story presented the daily operations of this business and the global AI access gap it touches. This time, our narrator Sukie provides another perspective: why someone with a complete business mindset still failed to make money after mastering the technology, marketing, and compliance. When the barrier to entry for a business is so low that anyone can enter, and profits are destined to grow only through gray-market operations or ecosystem nesting, where is the space left for compliant, independent proxy service operators? The following is Sukie's account. Our account pool mainly comes from two sources: partners in Singapore provide a portion, and we register a portion ourselves. The ones we register ourselves follow a compliant path, using real payment methods and identity information. These accounts have high costs and are slow to acquire, but they offer the best stability. There are also accounts of unknown origin in the industry; some people buy stolen accounts, use fake identities, or even use bots for batch registration. They are cheap but high-risk. Once traced by the upstream platform, the entire account pool can be wiped out. This is why our costs cannot come down; accounts from compliant sources are inherently expensive. This is a core contradiction in the proxy service industry: either it's cheap but carries compliance risks, or it's expensive but can run long-term. We chose the latter. In 2024, the industry still had a gross margin of 30% to 40%. The top 20 scaled proxy services were basically all profitable, and the dimension of competition was stability and customer service experience, not price. The turning point was the second half of 2025. Wave after wave of new players entered, each undercutting the price. First 20% off, then 30% off, 40% off, and by early 2026, some were charging 50% or even 70% off the official price. The current state is that players willing to price for healthy margins cannot survive because users have left; those charging ultra-low prices cannot survive either because costs cannot be compressed to that level, so they can only rely on gray-market operations to sustain themselves. From an industry perspective, if using a compliant account pool, plus labor and server costs, the minimum profitable pricing is about 70% to 80% of the official price. Below this range, either the account pool has issues, or they are burning investors' money. At 10% of the official price, it is impossible to be profitable through compliant means, because the rate of the upstream accounts themselves is more than 10%. There is word-of-mouth in the developer community. Users attracted by ultra-low prices in the short term soon find issues with service quality, token counting discrepancies, and inconsistent model outputs, and they churn quickly. But after they leave, they take their distrust of the entire industry with them, which hurts the whole track. The biggest mistake I made was being in the US but choosing to earn RMB. Our costs are settled in USD—account pools, servers, and payment channels are all in USD—but our revenue is in RMB, and we are collecting from the developer group in the Chinese market that is most sensitive to price. Chinese users are extremely sensitive to price, and their willingness and ability to pay are not on the same level as European and American clients. If you are in the US, you should directly do business with European and American companies and earn USD. Selling proxy services to