I’ve been building AI projects for a while, and honestly the most frustrating part hasn’t been the tech — it’s been paying for APIs from India.
Doesn’t matter which provider I try, I keep running into the same issues:
Need a USD credit card (not everyone has one)
3–5% forex markup on every transaction
Random international payment failures
No UPI / NetBanking support
Feels strange that we can pay for almost everything easily in India, but developer tools are still stuck in this flow.
I got tired of dealing with this and ended up building a small workaround for myself — basically a proxy layer where I can pay in INR (UPI) and still use a single API key across different models.
Didn’t plan to make it public, but a few other devs I know started using i, so now I’m curious:
Are others facing this too?
How are you handling API payments right now?
Trying to understand if this is a real problem or just something I got stuck on.