As a developer in China working with international clients, I noticed a recurring problem: developers worldwide wanted to use Baidu's AI models (ERNIE-4.5 is genuinely competitive with GPT-4), but the onboarding was brutal — Chinese phone verification, Chinese payment methods, Chinese-only documentation. So I built GoldBean: a thin API layer that handles authentication, payment, and routing. Developers get a single API key, standard REST endpoints, and pay-per-call pricing via crypto (x402/USDC), PayPal, or Alipay. The biggest challenge was building the payment infrastructure — supporting both crypto micropayments (x402 protocol) and traditional payments (PayPal/Alipay) while keeping the API simple enough that you can test it with a single curl command. Started as a side project, now has 67 endpoints covering LLMs, OCR, image recognition, NLP, speech, translation, and even protein folding.

GoldBean API

67 Baidu AI endpoints. One REST API. Pay-per-call.

67 Baidu AI endpoints. One REST API. Pay-per-call.