How to use the Claude & DeepSeek APIs from Indonesia — pay in Rupiah via QRIS (no credit card)

Disclosure: This is the Nexotao team — I'm describing our own gateway below. I've kept it to facts you can verify yourself: every model name, context window, and price here is on our live pricing page, and I link it.

If you're an Indonesian developer, you've probably hit this wall: the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs want a foreign credit card. No card, no API. A lot of us get stuck right there.

The fix that works today: a local gateway that takes QRIS / Rupiah. Here's the honest version of how it works, what it costs, and what it doesn't do.

Two live models, one compatible API

Through Nexotao you call two text models:

• Claude Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4-8) — context window 350,000 tokens
• DeepSeek-V4-Pro — context window 131,072 tokens

Those are the real, published context windows — no silent truncation. The endpoint is OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible, so you usually just change the base URL and key.

OpenAI format:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.nexotao.com/v1", api_key="sk-nexo-...")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="claude-opus-4-8",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Anthropic format:

curl https://api.nexotao.com/v1/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: sk-nexo-..." \
  -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"claude-opus-4-8","max_tokens":256,
       "messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

How you pay

• Top up your Rupiah balance via QRIS, from Rp10,000. No foreign card.
• Pay-as-you-go — deducted per token. No subscription, and the balance never expires.
• Every response carries an X-Cost-Rp header, so you see the exact rupiah cost of each request.

What it costs

At the time of writing, Claude Opus 4.8 runs roughly 70% below official retail input pricing through the gateway — but don't take my word for it. The comparison page shows live per-token rates and computes "vs official" automatically. Find a cheaper equivalent? Tell us.

What it is not (so you're not surprised)

• No free credits. New accounts start at zero — you top up to use it.
• Only the two text models above. No image/transcription, no other model families right now.
• The gateway is Anthropic/OpenAI-compatible, not official Anthropic/OpenAI infrastructure.

That's the whole pitch: if a foreign credit card was the only thing between you and the Claude/DeepSeek APIs, paying in Rupiah via QRIS removes it. Compare the numbers yourself on the pricing page.