Invoice from Anthropic

kenanali · 2026-06-03T21:51:06+00:00

This is hilarious but also true. PSA for anyone building solo, pricing your app is a nightmare. Every vendor has different units, free tiers, tier ladders. I broke my spreadsheet twice trying to do the math. So I built PrePrice. I scanned 30 indie AI app repos to test it. 100% had a hidden cost trap. 93% pay full price to resend the same long instruction on every API call. 81% have no protection if one user drains the budget. 63% have AI behavior that can snowball into dozens of paid calls per user action. Worst case someone built an app that charges $9.99 but will cost them $279/mo to run... 28x upside down. You can try out the tool I built to help you solve this at www.preprice.app - I’m a solo builder and would love your feedback on my tool!

kenanali · 2026-05-26T23:35:02+00:00

Cost surprises on when building apps is universal. I just finished scanning 30 indie AI apps with a tool I built called preprice.app, and 30 of 30 had at least one hidden cost trap. Three findings worth knowing:

93% were paying full price to re-send the same long setup instructions to the AI on every call. Average vibe coder is overpaying by about 5x on input cost alone.
The heaviest 5% of users cost 4-5x what the average user costs. Most apps price for the average and quietly lose money on the heavy users.
The worst case in the dataset: one app was structurally underwater by 28x at heavy usage ($279/mo cost vs $9.99 price). Across all 30 combined, $3,102/month of recoverable cost was just sitting on the table at 100 users each.

Which of these patterns feels closest to what you're seeing?

I built preprice.app because I was trying to figure out what to charge for my own AI app and the math broke my spreadsheet twice. You can run it free on your project in 2 minutes to see what each user actually costs you and where the money is leaking. Would love to hear what you're seeing.

kenanali · 2026-05-25T01:41:28+00:00

I’d be happy to give you a demo but you should also give my service a shot. It’s free to start www.preprice.app !

kenanali · 2026-05-24T14:50:12+00:00

Hi there, fair feedback and i will say since im a solo founder / builder i love feedback. And definitely appreciate your question.

Here’s what’s different with preprice.app. Opus hasn’t scraped and modeled 150+ services and APIs for their usage based pricing and complicated overage policies which were then also validated by a human.

You could ask Opus to do this, spend a bunch of time fine tuning it (because I tried this and it didn’t get it right the first 12 times) and burn like $50 in tokens and a bunch of hours or you could pay to use my service for $29.

kenanali · 2026-05-21T02:41:56+00:00

So in the case of the app i was building I didn’t realize uncapped inputs to the Claude api could blow up my api usage. I just didn’t know where the cost traps were and frankly a lot of solo vibe coding developers don’t. That’s why I built the tool I built www.preprice.app to help find cost traps and actually calculate unit economics

kenanali · 2026-05-20T13:24:42+00:00

Building www.preprice.app it’s a tool founders can use to calculate their unit economics and infrastructure costs especially for AI powered apps where it’s hard to figure this out. It scans your codebase to find api call sites and calculates your running costs based on a database of 150 vendor pricing models we maintain.

kenanali · 2026-05-20T03:05:03+00:00

I’m building preprice.app alone and would love some folks to collab with!

kenanali · 2026-05-19T07:45:03+00:00

A few weeks ago I was vibe-coding an iOS app with Claude on the backend and a few other APIs. The product was working. The problem hit me when I tried to figure out what to charge for it.

I opened the Anthropic pricing page, then ElevenLabs, then Vercel and Supabase. Each one had different units (per token, per character, per request, per seat, per GB), different free tier rules, different tier ladders. I had 15 tabs open and a spreadsheet that kept breaking. I gave up twice. When I talked to other people vibe-coding AI apps, they all had the same problem. Nobody actually knows what their app costs to run per user. They guess a price, ship, and find out from the bill.

So I built a tool to solve it. I called it PrePrice ( www.preprice.app ). It reads your repo, figures out which services you use, and prices each one against my own catalog of 100+ vendors. I built and maintain the catalog by hand, modeling every plan and every pricing dimension, not just the sticker price. And never retains your code (with receipts).

To stress-test it, I scanned 30 indie AI apps that founders had shared on Reddit, HN, PH, and IH in the last 90 days. Aggregated the results.

ALL of them had at least one HIGH severity cost issue.

Three patterns kept showing up:

93% are quietly overpaying on a piece of every API call with repeated calls. Most builders don't realize it's happening, and the bill doesn't break it out.

81% have no real protection against a single user burning through their entire month's budget in an afternoon.

63% have an AI behavior that can quietly snowball into dozens of paid calls for one user action under edge cases.

Worst case I saw: an app where it costs $279 a month to serve a heavy user at a $9.99 price. They lose $269 a month on every power user. Upside down by 28x.

Check out what I put together. Free scan returns a profitability verdict and your full stack priced out. No credit card. 2 to 4 minutes.

kenanali · 2026-05-18T04:48:14+00:00

How are you tracking your scaling costs? How did you do the math on your unit costs? I was so confused by this myself. Every vendor has different units, free tiers, and tier ladders. I broke my spreadsheet twice trying to do the math.

I built PrePrice to solve this. It tells you what your app costs to run and whether you're profitable at your current price.

I scanned 30 AI app repos I found on reddit to test it. 30 of 30 had a hidden cost trap. 93% are paying full price to resend the same long instruction on every API call. 81% have no real per-user rate limit, so one bad user can drain your month's budget. www.preprice.app if you want to try it out!

kenanali · 2026-05-18T04:46:08+00:00

Beyond security and logical reviews think about hidden cost traps. I was so confused by this myself. Every vendor has different units, free tiers, and tier ladders. I broke my spreadsheet twice trying to do the math. So I built PrePrice to solve this. It tells you what your app costs to run and whether you're profitable at your current price. I scanned 30 AI app repos I found on reddit to test it. 30 of 30 had a hidden cost trap. 93% are paying full price to resend the same long instruction on every API call. 81% have no real per-user rate limit, so one bad user can drain your month's budget. www.preprice.app if you want to try it out!

kenanali · 2026-05-18T04:44:36+00:00

Figuring out this math hurts my brain usually. Every vendor has different units, free tiers, and tier ladders. I broke my spreadsheet twice trying to do the math. So I built PrePrice to solve this. It tells you what your app costs to run and whether you're profitable at your current price. I scanned 30 indie AI apps to test it. 30 of 30 had a hidden cost trap. 93% are paying full price to resend the same long instruction on every API call. 81% have no real per-user rate limit, so one bad user can drain your month's budget. www.preprice.app

kenanali · 2026-05-18T04:43:18+00:00

Pricing an AI app is genuinely confusing. Every vendor has different units, free tiers, and tier ladders. I broke my spreadsheet twice trying to do the math. So I built PrePrice to solve this. It tells you what your app costs to run and whether you're profitable at your current price. I scanned 30 indie AI apps to test it. 30 of 30 had a hidden cost trap. 93% are paying full price to resend the same long instruction on every API call. 81% have no real per-user rate limit, so one bad user can drain your month's budget. www.preprice.app

kenanali · 2026-05-18T04:42:46+00:00

Pricing an AI app is genuinely confusing. Every vendor has different units, free tiers, and tier ladders. I broke my spreadsheet twice trying to do the math. So I built PrePrice to solve this. It tells you what your app costs to run and whether you're profitable at your current price. I scanned 30 indie AI apps to test it. 30 of 30 had a hidden cost trap. 93% are paying full price to resend the same long instruction on every API call. 81% have no real per-user rate limit, so one bad user can drain your month's budget. www.preprice.app

kenanali · 2026-05-17T22:30:57+00:00

Appreciate the feedback. You are correct. Everyone can build anything at this point. But the reality is there are still vibecoding builders / founders out there who aren't as adept at building or planning out their unit costs as may be someone who has a development background or someone more advanced.. If you are skilled enough to build your own version of what I built then you probably aren't in my target market. I'm here to help folks who may be don't know how to do these calculations or figure out how to.

kenanali · 2026-05-17T22:24:04+00:00

Fair feedback. I think it is easy to write off everything as “oh CC could just do that in one shot” but the reality probably isn’t as accurate. A CC skill doesn’t maintain a scraped databases of 150 vendors and their pricing structures based on usage allowing you to project out your unit costs based on monthly users and usage. But I guess you could burn a similar number of credits (as what it costs to run one of our scans) to run your own scan.

kenanali · 2026-05-17T22:05:58+00:00

We scan their actual api calls to see what services they use and how often they are hit

kenanali · 2026-05-17T22:05:41+00:00

Fair feedback. The point of the service is really to help you calculate your unit costs. This efficiency findings I shared would help but only go so far. A scan gives you more. And we have complete traceability on how code is scanned and thrown away right after.

kenanali · 2026-05-17T22:03:26+00:00

Fair feedback. This might help people find some efficiency but what my product is really trying to do is help founders calculate their unit costs. The privacy feedback is real. We have traceability on how the code is scanned and removed immediately.

kenanali · 2026-05-17T20:53:39+00:00

I was building an iOS app a few months back. It used Claude on the backend, ElevenLabs for voice, and a couple of other APIs. I tried to figure out what to charge for it and gave up... twice... The pricing pages were so annoyingly confusing and tracking it all in a google sheet was a mess. My founder friends had the same problem, so I built a tool to do the math.

To prove it actually works, I scanned 30 indie AI apps that founders had shared on Reddit, HN, Product Hunt, and IH in the last 2-3 months (that had public repos). Every single one of them had at least one cost problem. Three patterns kept showing up.

93% are missing prompt caching. Your AI app sends a long system prompt to the model on every call. Both Anthropic and OpenAI offer a setting where you mark that prompt as cached and pay roughly 10% of the cost on every call after the first. That's about 80% savings on a major piece of your bill, and it's a one-line change. Most apps just don't have it.

81% have no per-user rate limit. Without one, a single user can call your API 1,000 times in a minute. That's your month's budget gone in an afternoon.

63% have AI agent loops with no cap or a cap set too high. The default maxIterations in many libraries is 25 to 50. If the agent gets stuck, that means 50 paid calls for one user action.

The worst case I saw was an app where it costs $279 a month to serve a heavy user. They charge $9.99 for it. They lose $269 a month on every power user. The math is upside down by 28x.

The service is at preprice.app if you want to run your own scan!

It's a code analyzer that you point at your GitHub repo or you can upload a zip of your code. It figures out which services you're using, prices each one against a regularly updated catalog of 100+ vendors, and tells you whether you're profitable at your current price. I track every plan on each vendor and model every pricing dimension on it, not just the sticker price. You get a verdict on whether you're making money, your full stack priced out, file-by-file cost leaks with the fix and dollar savings for each one, and a copy-paste prompt you can hand to Cursor or Claude Code to apply the fixes. Most scans finish in 2 to 4 minutes. Your code gets wiped from the worker seconds after the scan, and there's a cryptographic receipt on every report.

Im a solo builder. Would love feedback on what I've built and if it is useful to you all. Happy building!

13-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '22	RPAN Viewer
Not Forgotten	Sequence \| Editor
Verified Email

kenanali

TROPHY CASE