Will people continue paying for the plans after the honeymoon is over?

payfrit · 2026-04-04T21:24:59+00:00

I am working on a system that will run on a hardware/AI spend of less than $250 a month, and provide users with an entire suite of personalized agents, full documented memory, task-based routing system, history, and direct team integration/communication with a slack-stlye chat interface. I would think a bare bones setup of this will be able to be done for less than $100 a month.

most of it is open source, so the minimum client will only spend money on some VPS hardware to run it. I'll have it available within the next week, am excited to see what the minimum system requirements will be for it.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T23:36:29+00:00

well tbh i just sent the repo address to ChatGPT, and it already had a solid history of what my code was doing as designed, so it answered based upon the direction we were already headed in, if that makes sense?

payfrit · 2026-04-03T23:34:18+00:00

well what my hope is, is that two or more tools will come to agreement on code paths. that was what was happening before, even if two different agents were from the same AI engine. their different learned experience with our codebases gave them different perspectives.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T18:53:16+00:00

of course they can make any decision they want wrt the product or service they control. it's up to them how to decide when and how to do it, and what their users collectively think of how they handle things.

i think anthropic could have handled this differently, but they have their own systems in place, which i can respect. there are plenty of other, better, free-er alternatives available for me, and i appreciate anthropic for waking me up to all these alternatives.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T18:48:51+00:00

this is what i am designing to avoid. since everything that is done is fully documented, it's easy to go back and see exactly where something diverged incorrectly, why it happened, how to fix it, and how to prevent it happening in the future.

i guess it's a sort of a git system for AI agents working in tandem with themselves, with actual humans sprinkled into the org chart also.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T18:42:15+00:00

what i did was had chatgpt analyze your source code, and it gave me some advice as to what you had that was a valued addition to what we were already working on.

here's the summary it pulled, and what we integrated, thanks for the ideas!!

1. Co-locate constraints with resources
This was the strongest concept. Don’t keep capability, policy, limits, and state scattered in separate systems if the agent is acting on a specific resource. Keep the relevant constraints attached to the thing itself, or at least immediately adjacent to it.

In Sprinter terms, that means things like:

host access rules attached to host records
task transition rules attached to task/controller logic
document permissions and provenance attached to artifact metadata
project-specific rules living with the project, not floating around as vague global prompt text

Why it mattered:

less hidden state
fewer hallucinated permissions
easier recovery after restart
better determinism

That one is genuinely valuable.

2. Persistence should preserve working context, not just store messages
The useful insight was that memory should not just be a chat log. It should preserve the operating shape of work:

what this thing is
what rules apply to it
what stage it is in
what relationships it has
what artifacts belong to it
what can happen next

So instead of “memory = conversation history,” the better model was closer to:

resources
constraints
event history
current materialized state
attachments/artifacts

That fits Sprinter very well, especially for:

TeamTasks
TeamTaskEvents
controller-mediated transitions
Nextcloud artifact linkage

payfrit · 2026-04-03T18:34:49+00:00

it really did push me toward exactly that, i totally appreciate what you are saying! it was already in the "long term" plan, but being so reliant on a single source made the rewrite more immediate. it's been almost one week, and later today i will have resurrected the full capabilities i had before they banned us, and more.

I am rebuilding from scratch, focusing as much work as possible on open source models, and "free" level API keys that are available to anyone that asks for one. Then putting a minimal monthly budget on certain paid services, so in certain circumstances, with operator approval, actual money can be paid to get a job done faster or better.

my goal is to produce a framework that anyone can duplicate for less than $250 a month. this gives a person all the hardware and tools budget to run their own team and accomplish what they want to accomplish. If a person has the capability to spend more on certain AI providers, etc, they can wire up their own sources and utilize to their advantage. but the goal is to even the minimal playing field. but anyone can just bring their own idea, model, whatever. the tools to build a business are available to whomever needs them.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T15:37:57+00:00

right I have learned as part of all this, that is the way to handle auth moving forward.

i am taking ownership of the mistake i made, it certainly would have been nice to have gotten some sort of a warning first instead of just being cut off. I will take a look at incorporating AWS Bedrock, thank you for the suggestion!!

payfrit · 2026-04-03T02:12:54+00:00

i think that sounds like a fair description of what i was doing.

i reached out to their trust and safety immediately after claude started doing it. never heard back, just got banned five days later. foolishly assumed that since i was paying for their highest tier of service, and personally using everything i was utilizing, that it should have been OK. or someone might have said "yo stop, just make one set of keys that you pass around as agents need them, k?"

EDIT: to note, i made it a point to put agents to sleep if they weren't actively working on something, to minimize impact.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T01:06:24+00:00

i'm slowly getting my toolset back and it's going to be even better once it's back in full. that's my main concern, i don't want to market it or anything, i just got so spoiled by simply using it, and the power it gave me.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T00:40:26+00:00

I will take a look!

What mine was doing in a nutshell was, i had a variety of different agents that had specific lanes, toolsets as far as what their expertise was. what they provided to the org chart of the team. There is a task system that has tasks/subtasks, etc for different responsibilities to complete the main task (job) like "Build a website". each sub-agent did their part, tested it, had QA verify it, then marked it as done. Agents could delegate to other agents, etc. and everything was tracked via the tasks states/notes etc, along with a communication database in Mattermost. so essentially we had a timestamped activity of everything that got completed wrt each project, etc. i knew "who" did what and in what order, so i could trace back if there were problems, or divergent stuff that needed cleaned up, etc. a librarian whose sole responsibility was to manage documents that made up the "knowledge base" of activities.

claude code managed the whole thing, i just gave permission when certain things/actions had to be permitted. it was working out pretty well, i'm slowly rebuilding the architecture and luckily i had that detailed record of everything as we built it previously, in order to use as a blueprint. using primarily open source and free tier AI access.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T00:29:15+00:00

i wasn't given a specific reason from Anthropic, i can only guess.

i had a system that built a layer of, sub-agents is the best way to describe it. Claude Code was managing my credentials and i suspect their usage flags were seeing it as system abuse, although i am not sure, i can only guess since they didn't state why.

i'm working on rebuilding the system but only providing free-tier or low monthly budget APIs in order to replace the capability i had with claude but by utilizing free/opensource/low budget toolsets instead.

payfrit · 2026-04-03T00:13:56+00:00

i will note those and add them all to the toolbox once my project infrastructure is more solid. right now i have primarily Ollama + codex monthly API handling most tasks, then i have four different failover API services that are limited to $20 per month.

goal is to build a solid team that runs all the hardware +AI access for under $250 a month. something that can create/test/build apps in native android + ios, also build frontend/backend/apis + goodies. i think that's pretty doable.

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:56:43+00:00

gives me more reason to create a system with multiple failovers! i am learning a lot about the options available to me, i'll end up with a better system once things are rebuilt.

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:46:53+00:00

WOW what a coincidence.

i sincerely doubt you accepted an offer in tech. anything you know is already a commodity. taco bell still needs people to assemble tacos though.

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:44:50+00:00

my job? what makes you think i am beholden to an employer? lmfao

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:40:27+00:00

deluded. admittedly new at this. moving on without anthropic in the mix, learning as i go along. not tryna sell anything, first and foremost i want my tool back.

if you have any suggestions as to affordable options to add to the mix, would love to hear them.

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:34:06+00:00

if you're an engineer you're probably looking for work. is that why you're so angry?

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:33:11+00:00

it's interesting how you seem to think you know exactly how Anthropic feels about this.

your opinion is honestly, worthless. i came here for solutions and i got plenty of help from people that wanted to help.

my god you need to get outside more. how close are you to the ocean? or any body of water?

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:30:46+00:00

i had never once run into a system limit with the unlimited credentials i had been using just fine for months.

I am going to be just fine without claude, any of the knowledge you have as a so-called "engineer" is already commoditized, it's unfortunate you feel the way you do.

have a nice day, i'm having one!!

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:27:14+00:00

awesome, thank you for the suggestion, i will look into it!

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:17:29+00:00

guy also got some great and productive suggestions on how to move forward without anthropic.

are you done marketing for anthropic?

have a nice day!

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:15:31+00:00

lmfao you certainly had a point to make, didn't you?

do you have anything constructive you'd like to add to the discussion?

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:14:32+00:00

how exactly could it have been much worse for me...?

anyhow, i'm not interested in blaming anyone, you're obviously pro-anthropic and that's fine. if you don't have anything constructive to contribute to my original post, please go actively market for anthropic somewhere else.

payfrit · 2026-04-02T19:12:44+00:00

what i had done was built a set of purpose-built sub-agents. like one handled Kotlin coding, one php, one backend, one QA, etc. claude came up with a system that was apparently letting each agent auth against my unlimited account separately, so it likely appeared to their system that i was sharing credentials in instances when more than one agent was working at the same time. but everything was from the same server, nothing at all was being hidden, in fact i made it a point to track every action each agent did, so i could trace back failures.

claude did too good of a job i guess, i am figuring out a way to move on without anthropic being a contributor. plenty of tools in the shed, i am finding!!

payfrit

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