Disclosure: I built AiCredits to solve my own payment friction. This post is a transparent breakdown of the problem, the trade-offs, and why a proxy might make sense for testing. Not sponsored. Not hiding the markup. DeepSeek has arguably the best price-to-performance ratio among major LLM APIs. At $0.28 per million input tokens for deepseek-chat , it's roughly 10x cheaper than GPT-4o. But here's the friction most tutorials gloss over: The Problem: Friction Before the First Token Minimum top-up threshold — The official platform may require a higher minimum deposit than you want for testing. Sometimes you just want to spend $1 to verify the full flow works. Payment method variability — DeepSeek accepts credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, but what's actually available depends on your region . Users in Southeast Asia, Africa, or the Middle East often find some options missing or get hit with currency conversion delays.…