accessing mainland-hosted deepseek from the US (phone verification workaround)

not in china but needed deepseek for a side project. official signup wanted phone verification i could not get. tried a few aggregators too – outputs on "deepseek" endpoints were ok for english but felt off on chinese idioms and tech terms. side by side same prompt, mainland-routed vs overseas, difference was obvious for me. ended up using an openai-compatible gateway that routes to mainland endpoints (not a mirror). swap base_url + api key, rest of stack unchanged. tested deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-fl