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chenyu
chenyu

Posted on AI-assisted

Getting a DeepSeek, GLM or Kimi API key when your phone number and your card are the problem

#deepseek #api #tutorial #llm

Every few weeks someone emails the same thing: the model is fine, I just can't buy it.

The models stopped being the hard part a while ago. Signing up is the hard part, and it fails in three separate places:

  1. A phone number you don't have. Some platforms only accept a mobile number registered in one country. Virtual numbers get flagged within minutes, and then you're locked out of the account you were trying to create.
  2. An identity check before billing. Some platforms won't let you add credit until you've uploaded an ID document. Reasonable if you're in that market, a dead end if you're not.
  3. A card that gets declined. Even where signup works, AI and API merchants are routinely declined on foreign cards — especially on smaller banks and on prepaid or virtual cards.

Any one of those is enough to stop you. They tend to arrive together.

The four routes that actually exist

Route What you pay with Works when The catch
Buy direct from the provider Whatever method they support That method works for your country and bank Phone checks, ID checks, declines
An international cloud that hosts the models Card, invoice You already buy cloud there Model versions lag, rates differ
A gateway with one OpenAI-compatible key Card, prepaid Your card clears a normal online merchant You pay a margin over raw token cost
Self-hosting an open model Your own hardware You need full control It isn't the same model

People jump straight to the last row, which is the most expensive way to get a worse answer. Work down the table instead.

Six things to check before you prepay anyone

This applies to us as much as to anyone else.

  1. What's the minimum top-up? If the cheapest way to evaluate a provider is $20, keep looking. You should be able to test the latency from your own city for pocket change.
  2. Prepaid, or subscription? Subscriptions fail at renewal for reasons that have nothing to do with you: an expired card, a re-authentication rule, a merchant flagged as high-risk. A prepaid balance cannot fail at renewal.
  3. Is it genuinely OpenAI-compatible? "Compatible" should mean you change base_url and the key, and nothing else. Ask for the exact endpoint before you pay.
  4. What happens if the credit doesn't land? The honest answer is "email us and we check the payment record against your account". The suspicious answer is "it's fully automatic, don't worry".
  5. Does the balance expire? Look for the exact wording, not the marketing version of it.
  6. Can you spend it down and leave? No minimum commitment, no auto-renew, no cancellation maze. If you can't leave, you're not a customer, you're a subscriber.

The integration is the boring part, which is good

If the endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, migration is two lines:

curl https://api.switchllm.net/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SWITCHLLM_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "deepseek-flash",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "hello"}]
  }'
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Or with the standard SDK:

from openai import OpenAI
import os

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.switchllm.net/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["SWITCHLLM_KEY"],
)

print(client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-flash",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "hello"}],
).choices[0].message.content)
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Everything downstream keeps working, because they all speak this format: Cursor, Cline, LangChain, your own loop.

The cost math, without the marketing

Credit packs are one-time purchases from $9.9. Nothing renews.

A project making 300 calls a day costs about $0.36 a month on the cheapest model listed, about $10 a month on deepseek-flash, and about $45 a month on the largest model on the site. Those figures are just the published per-million rates multiplied out — 9,000 calls a month times the cost per request. You can redo the arithmetic from the pricing page instead of trusting me.

The point isn't that it's cheap. It's that the bill is small enough to predict, and you can stop by simply not topping up.

Disclosure

I run SwitchLLM — the third row of that table. One key for DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, prepaid from $9.9, sign-up with an email address. New accounts get a small trial balance to test the integration before paying anything.

If a card works for you and the providers you want don't put a phone check and an ID check in your way, buying direct is cheaper and you should do that. This post is for the case where they do.

If you want your own numbers

Send me the shape of your sessions — turn counts, or a sample of request logs with the text stripped out — and I'll run the same three variants against your distribution and send back the table.

It costs me an afternoon and a few cents of tokens, and it's the only way I get to see sessions that aren't mine. support@switchllm.net

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