If you buy model access through a cheap "GPT / Claude / DeepSeek" API relay, you have a trust problem nobody puts on the pricing page: some relays quietly swap in a smaller, quantized, or context-truncated model and bill you for the flagship. The nasty part is the timing — it often works fine on day one and degrades weeks later, right after you've stopped checking.
This article is the verification playbook I wish existed when I started evaluating gateways. It works against any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoint, and at the end there's a small open-source tool that automates the whole thing.
Disclosure up front: I work on daoxe, one such gateway. I'm writing the verification method so you can test any provider — including us. A verification tool is only useful if it will just as happily flag the people who wrote it.
The one check that doesn't work
The obvious move is to ask the endpoint: "What model are you?"
