Can you actually use the DeepSeek API?
Most guides assume you already have WeChat, Alipay and a Chinese phone number. If you don't, nothing fails loudly at signup — it fails at the payment step, with no error code, and people quietly give up. Answer five questions to see which step stops you, then put your own token volume through the calculator.
1. Which step will stop you
Answer honestly — the point is to find the wall before you hit it.
Do you have an email address you can sign up with?
Do you have a Chinese mobile number (+86)?
Do you have WeChat, and can you scan a QR code with it?
Can you pay in RMB — a working Alipay or WeChat Pay wallet?
Can you submit a passport for real-name verification and wait 1–3 business days?
Is this for a registered business that can make a corporate wire transfer (对公汇款)?
Your result
Answer the six questions above and the result appears here.
2. What your workload would cost
Enter your own monthly volumes. The official column uses DeepSeek's published per-token rates; the second column uses a flat card-billed rate of $0.65 per 1M tokens. Cache-hit input is where the two structures diverge most — on the official platform a cache hit costs almost nothing, which is why the difference between the two columns depends heavily on how repetitive your prompts are.
3. Where these numbers come from
Official rates are DeepSeek's published figures for deepseek-flash, in USD per 1M tokens, off-peak: $0.003 cache-hit input, $0.15 cache-miss input, $0.60 output. The peak window is 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday, and peak prices are double. Everything outside that window is off-peak.
Two caveats worth keeping in mind. First, DeepSeek's peak window lands squarely inside the Asian and European working day and entirely outside the North American one — a workload that runs during US business hours pays off-peak rates for all of it. Second, published rates change; the console and the pricing page are the only sources that count, and both were checked on 18 September 2026 for this page.
4. If you are stuck at the payment step
The routes that actually get through are covered in detail in the long-form guide, including the failure mode where a foreign card is attached to WeChat but RMB transactions are not enabled on that specific card.
- Email signup plus a passport — bypasses the +86 login wall, at the cost of 1–3 business days.
- Corporate wire transfer — bypasses the wallet entirely, if your organisation can do it.
- A card-billed endpoint — a key in minutes, billed in USD, no wallet and no real-name step. You pay a margin for that, which the calculator above puts a number on.
Want the flat-rate column instead of the setup?
An OpenAI-compatible endpoint carrying deepseek-flash, billed to a card in USD, with an Anthropic-compatible path for Claude Code and a Responses-compatible path for Codex CLI. No wallet, no real-name step, and no automatic overage charge.
Thelsy is not affiliated with DeepSeek and is not an official DeepSeek service. DeepSeek is a trademark of its respective owner. Figures on this page are for comparison and are subject to change without notice.