Back to browse
Costbase – See what each of your AI apps costs, without a proxy

Costbase – See what each of your AI apps costs, without a proxy

by yidaman·Jul 13, 2026·2 points·0 comments

AI Analysis

●●●BangerSolve My ProblemSlick

Read-only admin keys beat proxying traffic for cost tracking without the latency risk.

Strengths
  • Zero code changes required since it pulls data from provider billing APIs directly.
  • Unified dashboard merges spend across OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and ElevenLabs instantly.
  • Distinguishes provider-reported dollars from computed token estimates transparently.
Weaknesses
  • Data freshness limited by provider reporting lag rather than real-time traffic inspection.
  • Does not offer the prompt logging or debugging features that proxy tools provide.
Target Audience

Indie hackers and developers running multiple AI apps

Similar To

Helicone · LangFuse · Portkey

Post Description

Live demo, no signup: https://costbase.co/demo

Hi there, over the past 1-2 years I've built and experimented with many AI apps. Some are in production, some died in the experimental stage.

The ones in production currently costs me ~$500 a month to run – using a variety of models from OpenAI's Whisper to Anthropic LLM.

Because it's important for me to track the Cost of Goods Sold of each individual app, the strategy I've used so far is to use a different credit card for my few apps. However, that obviously does not work the more apps I build.

This is why I built Costbase – a simple app that just requires that I paste in an admin key with no code change (and no proxy sitting between my app and the AI provider) – and show me the cost of my AI bill broken down by apps and not API keys.

I intentionally kept this product as simple as possible – something I would actually like to use. I know there are observability tools like Helicone that are much more capable. But to be honest I didn't even try out the competitor and just built something I'd like to use myself.

I'd like to hear from the community to see if anyone feel a product like Costbase is genuinely useful.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

(I'm in Taipei so going to sleep in about two hours. Will be back tomorrow morning to answer any additional comments)

Similar Projects

Security●●Solid

OneCLI – Vault for AI Agents in Rust

Agents never see real keys, but Vault already does secret injection.

Solve My ProblemSlick
guyb3
161524mo ago
Security●●●Banger

Phantom – Let AI use your API keys without leaking them

Proxy tokens worthless if leaked, real keys never enter LLM context windows.

Big BrainSolve My ProblemDark Horse
masonwyatt23
203mo ago