SiliconFlow 硅基流动 (SiliconCloud)
OpenAI-compatible API access to 200+ open models, billed per token
Overview
SiliconFlow runs SiliconCloud, a pay-as-you-go API serving 200+ open-weight models (DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Llama) plus image, video and audio generation. Founded in Beijing in 2023 by ex-Microsoft Research scientist Yuan Jinhui, it targets developers who'd rather not run their own GPUs.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 3 Sep 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
What you can produce with SiliconFlow 硅基流动 (SiliconCloud)
- OpenAI-compatible REST API across 200+ open-weight models
- Per-token pay-as-you-go billing, no subscription required
- Custom inference engine for accelerated low-latency serving
- Text, image, video and audio model endpoints
- Fine-tuning and custom/BYOC deployment for enterprise
- Free signup credit plus always-free small models (e.g. Qwen2.5-7B)
- Separate China (siliconflow.cn) and global (siliconflow.com) platforms
SiliconFlow's pitch is straightforward: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, 200-plus open-weight models, priced by the token with no subscription lock-in. That combination made it a default pick for teams running DeepSeek, Qwen or GLM workloads without managing their own GPU fleet, and its June 2026 Series B (over 2 billion yuan, reportedly the largest MaaS round in China that year) suggests the growth is real. Free credits and always-free small models (Qwen2.5-7B) make it easy to trial.
The catch is verifiability: there's no G2, Capterra or Trustpilot presence to check claims against, and support is developer-forum-level rather than enterprise SLA. Rate limits scale with how much you've spent, which is fine for production but awkward for bursty free-tier testing. Solid default for cost-sensitive inference; less proven for teams needing contractual uptime guarantees or ASEAN data residency.
What people say
SiliconFlow doesn't show up on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius or Product Hunt — a Chinese-origin API provider serving a developer audience that mostly reviews products in Discord and GitHub issues rather than SaaS review sites. What there is points the same direction: developers cite the OpenAI-compatible endpoint as trivial to swap into existing tooling, and the pay-as-you-go model (no subscription, per-token billing across text, image, video and audio) as meaningfully cheaper than running comparable open models through providers like Together AI or Fireworks for Chinese-model-heavy workloads.
The company itself is young — founded in Beijing in August 2023 by Yuan Jinhui, a former Microsoft Research Asia principal researcher and founder of the OneFlow deep-learning framework, alongside co-founder Pan Yang. It raised an angel round that December and has since closed seven rounds; the June 2026 Series B, over 2 billion yuan, is described as the largest single raise in China's third-party Model-as-a-Service sector to date, putting the company's valuation near 7.74 billion yuan. That's a meaningful signal for a two-and-a-half-year-old infrastructure vendor.
Free tier is a genuine try-before-you-buy: new accounts get a starting credit, and some smaller models (Qwen2.5-7B among them) stay free indefinitely. Rate limits are tied to spend — accounts that have topped up at least a modest amount get materially higher request ceilings than unfunded free accounts, a reasonable anti-abuse mechanism, though it means testing at scale requires putting money down first.
What's missing from the public record is much independent complaint or praise beyond developer-forum chatter — no detailed outage post-mortems, no structured user reviews breaking down support quality. A GitHub issue on the Dify integration flags the need to self-limit embedding request rates to avoid bans, a minor but real operational wrinkle. For a platform this size serving production inference traffic, the lack of a visible support/SLA track record is the main open question for teams evaluating it beyond hobby or prototype use.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including SiliconFlow 硅基流动 (SiliconCloud)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with SiliconFlow 硅基流动 (SiliconCloud) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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