Testing an AI API from a country where the official card checkout keeps failing

Short summary

A practical checklist for developers in regions where AI provider billing pages fail (Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, etc.) focuses on separating access failures from integration failures. It covers discovering models via /v1/models, making minimal smoke-test calls, configuring the correct protocol dialect (Chat Completions, Responses, Anthropic Messages), and setting up Claude Code with gateway environment variables. The author promotes their DaoXE gateway but notes the checklist works for any OpenAI-compatible gateway.

• •Separate 'can't complete checkout' (access) from 'requests fail' (integration) problems
• •Start with curl smoke tests: /v1/models then a tiny chat completion with max_tokens=8
• •Match protocol dialect to your client: Chat Completions, Responses, or Anthropic Messages

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