Is the AIJWS Relay Any Good? 9 Things to Know Before Using Claude and GPT APIs from Hong Kong

AIJWS is a third-party AI API relay at api.aijws.com. You register, top up a prepaid balance, make a key, then switch any OpenAI-compatible tool's base URL to https://api.aijws.com/v1 and off you go. It isn't run by OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, and which models you get depends entirely on what accounts the operator has hooked up behind it.

The site is guarded by a Cloudflare check, and the open pages show no company name, address, terms, privacy policy or price list. Before you pay, all you see is a sign-up form; prices, models and top-up methods only show up in the console after you register.

OpenAI's list of supported countries and territories has no Hong Kong and no mainland China, and it says using or providing access from places off the list may get an account blocked or suspended. Anthropic's supported list leaves out Hong Kong and the mainland too, bans companies majority-owned or controlled by people or entities in unsupported regions, and bans anyone physically in an unsupported region.

Relays have a market in Hong Kong precisely because the official door is shut. But going through one means sitting in Hong Kong and borrowing someone else's account elsewhere to reach the models, which is exactly what the providers don't allow; once an upstream account gets banned, the service cuts out.

AIJWS's API throws exactly the same error messages as Sub2API, so that's what it runs. The open-source project has about 44,700 stars on GitHub and calls itself an AI API gateway for subscription quota distribution: it pools Claude, OpenAI and Codex, Gemini and Grok subscriptions or API keys, hands out its own keys to users, counts every token and deducts it from your balance.

The operator splits accounts and keys into groups, puts a rate multiplier on the model price for each group, and can route the model name you ask for to any upstream it likes. Payment goes through built-in EasyPay, Alipay, WeChat Pay or Stripe; which ones AIJWS actually switches on, you only find out at top-up.

Sub2API's README spells it out: using the project may violate the terms of service of Anthropic and other upstream providers, it's only meant for learning and research, and its authors have never authorised any commercial operation. Reselling pooled subscription quota to the public is exactly that kind of use.

The upstream accounts take the first hit: once a provider bans them, the relay can't serve those models any more, and whether you get your topped-up balance back is entirely up to the operator. AIJWS publishes no refund terms, so count a top-up as spent.

Our link opens AIJWS's sign-up page with the invite code A8RXXLZYJ3EL filled in. AIJWS doesn't publish any sign-up reward for invited users, and the price is the same with or without the code. Sub2API lets an operator give every new account a starting balance; if AIJWS has one switched on, you'll see it in the console however you signed up.

Disclosure: A8RXXLZYJ3EL is our invite code. On Sub2API sites the inviter gets a percentage of each of your top-ups as usage balance, at a rate the operator sets and AIJWS doesn't publish, so when you top up, we receive AIJWS credit.

On Sub2API sites it works like this: the model's listed price times your group's multiplier, taken from your prepaid balance, counted per token. AIJWS only lists models, prices and multipliers inside the console, so read them before you top up and remember which group your key is in.

For a benchmark, Anthropic's official Claude Opus 4.8 price is US$5 per million input tokens, US$25 per million output and US$0.50 per million cache hits. A day with 2 million input and 200,000 output tokens costs US$15 at the official price (about HK$117 at HK$7.8 to the US dollar); if 1.5 million of the input tokens are cache hits, it's US$8.25 (about HK$64). If the relay doesn't save you much on that, it isn't worth the terms, privacy and outage risks.

Every prompt, file and reply goes through AIJWS's servers first, then through someone else's upstream account. The operator doesn't even name a company, so if you wanted to sign a data processing contract, there's no one to sign with.

So client or boss code, login passwords, trade secrets and anyone's personal data should never go through here. If your work involves any of that, use a named service you can sign a contract with.

Sub2API lets the operator route a model name to any upstream, so from the outside you can't check which model is really answering. Stability also hangs on the upstream accounts: one ban or rate limit and it drops.

AIJWS has no app and no page on the big review platforms. User feedback mostly lives on relay-monitoring sites in mainland China; as of 24 October 2026 the top complaints were constant 503s and 429s at busy times, doubts that the model matches the label, and upstream bans knocking the service out, while the fans mostly praise the low price.

After signing up through our link, top up the smallest amount the console allows and make a separate key for each tool (Sub2API keys start with sk-), so you can revoke them one by one if something goes wrong. Put https://api.aijws.com/v1 as the tool's base URL.

Send a short request first and check the tokens and cost on the usage page before running anything long. Set your own spending cap in the tool and keep a backup ready, so an outage doesn't stop everything.

Give it a go: developers doing small personal projects or throwaway experiments, who care more about saving money than stability, and only put a little cash in.

Don't: anyone working for clients or a boss, anything with personal data or trade secrets, production systems, and anyone who doesn't want to cross a provider's terms through a third party.