News / Model Watch · Channel
Tmall's AI Space Station Fills Up: Kimi, MiniMax and DeepSeek Join the Token Retail Shelf — V4 Day Cards From ¥4.8
Two days after Zhipu opened the first LLM flagship store on Tmall, the platform's own follow-up is here at full strength: the AI Space Station (AI空间站) launched September 3 as a token top-up center, and by Sep 4–5 reporting it carries Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu, Kimi, MiniMax and DeepSeek side by side — including DeepSeek V4 day cards from ¥4.8. The shelf that used to be one vendor's experiment is now the industry's consumer storefront. Distribution changed; model prices didn't.
Tmall's AI Space Station (Sep 3) is a platform-level token retail channel — period subscriptions (Token Plan, Coding Plan) and pay-as-you-go top-ups, card-key or direct delivery, first batch Alibaba Cloud + Zhipu + Kimi + MiniMax + DeepSeek. Headline price: DeepSeek V4-Flash day cards at ¥4.8 for 6M tokens (¥8.8 / 12M; V4-Pro ¥4.8 / 2M) — but capped at 500 requests per 5 hours on low tiers, with day expiry: consumer tasters, not production pipes. Zhipu's 48-hour halo: brand search +50x, category token-subscription GMV +160% per Tmall sources. Official API rate cards are untouched — for production traffic, the API cost stack remains the real comparison.
What's on the shelf (Sep 3–5 reporting)
| Vendor | Representative listings | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | V4-Flash day card ¥4.8/6M · ¥8.8/12M; V4-Pro ¥4.8/2M · ¥8.8/4M | Low tiers: 500 req/5h; high: 1,000 |
| Kimi (K3) | Month cards ¥33 (1.65M) · ¥55 (2.75M) | Third-party stores; Kimi app uses pooled quotas |
| MiniMax (M3) | ¥55/month packs (24M → later ~700M bundles) | Bundle via Alibaba Cloud; dynamic cache billing |
| Alibaba Cloud | Token Plan ¥38.99/¥138.99; Qoder CN ¥58.99 | ¥0.01 below official site pricing |
| Zhipu | GLM Coding Plan from ¥118/month | Official flagship store (Sep 2) |
- Launch date and form (金融界, Sep 3): AI Space Station = token top-up center; products are period subscriptions and pay-as-you-go top-ups; card-key or direct top-up delivery.
- Vendor breadth (每经/财闻/观点网, Sep 4–5): beyond Alibaba Cloud and Zhipu, specialty stores list Kimi, DeepSeek and MiniMax subscriptions — the full first batch is live.
- The halo effect (财闻, Sep 4): Tmall sources say Zhipu's store drove +50x brand search in 48 hours and +160% GMV for token/subscription products on the platform.
- Consumer framing (每经): "buy tokens like phone credit" — day/week/month packs, standard e-commerce checkout, coupons and renewals.
Why API builders should care (and where to shrug)
- Day-card math is not API math. ¥4.8 for 6M tokens blends to ≈¥0.8/1M (~$0.11) — eye-catching against V4-Flash list rates, but 500-request-per-5-hours caps, day-window expiry and cache-dependent dynamic billing (per store support) make these personal taster packs. Production throughput still lives on the API.
- Rate cards didn't move. No vendor changed official API pricing with this launch. If you were benchmarking models by API cost yesterday, the ranking is unchanged today.
- It's a China-rails channel. Tmall checkout needs Chinese payment rails and accounts — irrelevant to most international builders, who keep using USD APIs or OpenAI-compatible relays (like ChinaModelAPI, an independent relay not affiliated with the vendors) with global billing.
- The demand signal is the story. +160% category GMV in 48 hours quantifies latent consumer willingness to pay for tokens — context for every vendor's retail-vs-API strategy, and for Kimi's licensing-and-revenue-share push on the enterprise side.
- Caveats: listings and prices are store-level and reportedly shift within days (MiniMax's pack changed twice in coverage); treat the table as Sep 3–5 snapshot, not a stable rate card.
Primary sources
FAQ (2026)
What is the AI Space Station?
Tmall's token top-up center, launched Sep 3, 2026 — first batch: Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu, Kimi, MiniMax, DeepSeek.
DeepSeek card prices?
V4-Flash day cards ¥4.8/6M and ¥8.8/12M tokens; V4-Pro ¥4.8/2M and ¥8.8/4M — low tiers capped at 500 req/5h.
Cheaper than the API?
Blended ≈$0.10/1M vs $0.44/$1.32 list — but request caps, day expiry and cache-based billing make them tasters, not endpoints.
Can I buy internationally?
Not practically — Chinese payment rails only. International access stays on USD APIs or global-billing relays.
Kimi / MiniMax there?
K3 month cards ¥33/¥55 via third-party stores (app uses pooled quotas); MiniMax M3 packs from ¥55, bundles shifting.
What changed for APIs?
Distribution, not prices. Rate cards stand; the +160% GMV spike is the consumer-demand signal worth tracking.