Hey Lobsters, welcome to this 3rd edition of ShanghAI.

The goal of this weekly newsletter is to share my latest discoveries on Chinese AI models, and how I use their powerful abilities as well as their prices to scale businesses.

Each week, I will share you free tools examples that you can try to build by yourself and see if they can help your business grow.

Use these unknown models without living in China or speaking Chinese can be a tough task. Good news ? I am, and I can help you to reach them.

All of this, readable within 2 minutes, because I know you guys are busy.

Last week, we turned your OS into a ghost operator with QClaw. Today, we’re hitting the biggest trend in tech: Vibe Coding.

While the West pays $20/month for Cursor, the East just dropped a massive price disruptor that changes the game for every broke builder.

While American IDEs are stuck with flat $20/month subscriptions, ByteDance’s Trae has officially moved to a hyper-flexible token-based model. Forget the "unlimited" myths, transparency is the new meta.

The real shocker? Trae just launched a $3 "Lite" plan.

In the world of Vibe Coding, where you iterate 100 times a minute, token efficiency is everything.

Because Trae is optimized for Chinese models like DeepSeek V3 and Doubao, your dollar goes 5x further.

You get a $5 "Basic Usage" credit in the Lite plan that actually lets you build a full MVP, simply because the cost per logic-chain is so much lower than on Claude or GPT.

It’s the same "Vibe" power, but for the price of a single coffee.

You can leverage Trae’s Solo Builder mode right now to build and launch micro-services for local businesses with zero financial risk.

The real opportunity lies in building mini-apps, think of a custom QR-code loyalty tracker or a smart inventory dashboard for shops that can’t afford a $5k dev fee but will gladly pay $50/month for a tool.

The math of "Vibe Coding" is where it gets interesting: because Trae is powered by the ultra-efficient DeepSeek-V3 engine, the cost of failing is virtually zero.

On a standard $20 Western AI subscription, a complex app that requires 50 iterations to fix bugs could easily eat up your monthly "fast" credits in a single afternoon.

With Trae’s $3 Lite plan, building a full functional prototype costs roughly $0.12 in usage credits. This means you can pivot, break things, and rebuild your entire project 40 to 50 times for the price of a single high-end American API call.

You aren't just buying code; you're buying the right to fail until it’s perfect, for less than the cost of a coffee.

The "China Wall" is finally crumbling for developers. The global version of Trae (trae.ai) is fully open, no +86 phone number or VPN required.

Trae is currently offering a 14-day Free Pro Trial for new users, which comes with a $10 usage credit for free. If you’re a student or a founder on a budget, this is your 2-week window to build your entire startup for $0.

I’ve spent the last few days perfecting a "Vibe-to-SaaS" system prompt that forces Trae to use the cheapest, fastest models without losing an ounce of logic. I’m sharing the full setup and the "No-Auth" login shortcuts in next week’s edition.