As an indie developer, I love building with AI. The possibilities are endless—until you look at the bill.
A few months ago, I was working on a new image generation app. Everything was going great until I started scaling my tests. I was using the standard providers (Google, Replicate, fal.ai), and while the quality was amazing, the costs were painful. Paying $0.04 per image doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re generating thousands of images or trying to offer a free tier to your users, it burns a hole in your pocket fast.
I did the math: if my app went viral, I’d be broke before I was profitable.
I looked around and saw other developers in the same boat. We were all paying premium prices for standard compute, effectively pricing us out of building the cool, accessible tools we wanted to make. I knew there had to be a better way.
The Solution
I started digging deep into how these APIs are structured and priced. I reached out to infrastructure partners and other parties in the AI space, looking for a way to optimize the supply chain.
That collaboration sparked an idea: what if we could pool resources and optimize the routing to drastically cut down the overhead?
After weeks of negotiation, engineering, and coffee, I’m proud to launch EccoAPI.
full article >>> https://eccoapi.com/articles/ecbc3147-c858-4e83-ab99-18b496308021
Top comments (0)