Sure enough, the most profitable business is still selling shovels. Here are some ways API intermediaries make money: 1. Zero-cost acquisition through stolen credit cards • Use stolen credit cards to bulk register accounts on platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic • Exploit payment verification loopholes to achieve almost zero-cost access • When accounts get banned, just create new ones and repeat the cycle 2. Reverse-engineered API reselling • Reverse-engineer the web chat interfaces of ChatGPT and Claude • Disguise them as standard APIs and sell them externally