We Put Flatkey on a Billboard on Highway 101

If you drive south past Brittan Ave this week, you'll see it: One API key. More AI models. More tools. Lower cost.

I want to be honest about why we did this, because "startup buys billboard" is usually a punchline.

Why a billboard

Not for impressions.

Because 101 is where our customers actually are. The people building AI products in this valley drive that road every morning. And a physical object on a highway buys something a CPM number can't — it says we're here, we're real, and we're not going anywhere.

There's also a detail I keep thinking about. A few hundred meters from our board, another billboard is selling 115 megawatts of dedicated AI compute.

That's the whole supply chain, on one stretch of road: someone selling the power, someone selling the silicon, and us selling the layer that decides which model your request should actually go to.

Why that layer exists

Every builder now has the same problem: the best model changes almost weekly.

GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — prices and capabilities move constantly. Last week DeepSeek shipped a model at $0.14 per million input tokens. The week before, OpenAI cut one of its models by 80%.

You should not be spending your time hand-picking models and rewriting integrations every time the leaderboard shuffles. You should describe what you need, and have a layer underneath trade off cost and capability for you.

That's the whole product: one key, one bill, 300+ models, 1,000+ tools.

The second board says it more plainly: One gateway to every AI model and tool.

But a billboard isn't traction

I've been building for a long time, and I've learned to be suspicious of moments that feel like victory.

A billboard is not traction. It's a promise made in public — which is a useful thing to make, because it means we now have to be worth the drive-by.

So if you saw it on your commute and you're curious: go try it. If it doesn't save you money or time, tell me and I'll want to know why. That's more useful to me than any impression count.

And to the team that shipped this — thank you. Building the thing is hard. Believing it deserves to be seen is harder.

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flatkey.ai — one key to every AI model and tool.