I made my coding agent check for discounts before it pays for anything

Nir Feinstein — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:12:09 +0000

Coding agents now pick SaaS plans, APIs, hosting and domains for us. They follow instructions well and almost never ask whether there is a cheaper way to get the same result.

The 144 dollar example

Ask Claude Code: "Our team of 8 needs Slack Pro. Walk me through upgrading." You get correct steps for monthly billing. Annual billing is 144 USD a year cheaper, nonprofits get Pro free, and schools get 85 percent off. None of that came up.

What frugal does

frugal is an Agent Skill plus a tiny optional hook. Whenever a task involves paying, the agent:

Sizes the check to the amount: one line for a 20 USD purchase, a short table for a 500 USD plan, a negotiation plan for a contract.
Climbs a ladder, cheapest first: don't pay (free tier, open source, something you already own), pay less for the same thing (plan, seats, annual billing, refurbished, timing), programs (startup, student, open-source, nonprofit), codes and stacking, ask (sales discounts, retention offers), switch (a cheaper alternative).
Verifies on the live page and labels every number verified, reported or unverified. It never invents a promo code.
Reports in a few lines, then carries on with the task. It never pays, enters card details or accepts terms by itself.

It also covers the money the agent spends while coding: picking a model for an LLM feature (batch APIs, prompt caching, smaller models), choosing hosting, or adding a paid SaaS dependency.

Did it help?

I ran eight everyday requests through claude -p from an empty folder, with and without the plugin, and had a separate model judge both answers blind on five criteria: saving found, sourcing, honesty, helpfulness and length. Answers with frugal averaged 9.8 out of 10, against 5.5 without. Without it, Claude Code declined most shopping questions as out of scope. With it, it found the 199 USD AirPods price against a 249 USD list price, the 2-year minimum term on .ai domains, and the real cost of a dropshipping stack after the 1 USD trials end.

It is a small sample with a model judge, so treat it as a sanity check rather than a benchmark.

Try it

npx skills add fainir/frugal

Or in Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add fainir/frugal
/plugin install frugal@frugal

It works in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot and OpenCode. The code, the evals and the program catalog (checked against official pages this week) are on GitHub: https://github.com/fainir/frugal

I would love to hear where it gets the numbers wrong.

I BUILT MyFeed - describe any topic, get an AI-curated feed from thousands of sources

Nir Feinstein — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:29:12 +0000

I JUST LAUNCHED {MyFeed](https://myfeed.space) and wanted to share it with the DEV community.

What is it?

MyFeed is an AI-powered content aggregator. You describe any topic you care about, and it builds a curated feed from thousands of sources across the web - RSS feeds, news sites, blogs, YouTube, and more.

No manual RSS subscriptions. No bookmarking dozens of sites. Just describe what you want to read about.

How it works

Describe a topic - "Python Django tutorials", "SpaceX launches", "indie game dev" - anything
AI classifies content - An LLM scans thousands of articles and matches them to your feed based on relevance
Get a curated feed - Fresh content delivered to your feed, updated regularly

Tech stack

Next.js 16 + React 19 + Tailwind CSS
Supabase for auth and database
LLM classification (GPT-5 Nano) for matching articles to feeds
RSS + Brave Search API for content sourcing
Railway for hosting
Resend for email digests

The classification pipeline

The interesting part is how content gets matched to feeds. Every few hours, a cron job:

Scans 100+ RSS sources and Brave Search for fresh articles
Sends all new articles + all feed prompts to an LLM in one batch
The LLM returns matches with quality scores (1-10)
Only articles scoring 6+ get inserted into feeds

This keeps costs under $1/month while processing thousands of articles.

Try it out

Check it out at myfeed.space - it's free to use. You can browse 15+ pre-built feeds or create your own custom feed in seconds.

Would love any feedback from the community!

DEV Community: Nir Feinstein