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brian austin
brian austin

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I give developers Claude API access for $2/month. Here's what they build with it.

#api #claudeai #webdev #programming

I give developers Claude API access for $2/month. Here's what they build with it.

Most AI API discussions focus on OpenAI's pricing: $0.002/token here, $15/million tokens there.

I took a different approach: flat $2/month, unlimited calls, one API key.

Here's what developers are actually building with it — and the exact API spec.

The API (the short version) 

curl -X POST https://simplylouie.com/api/chat \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"message": "explain this code", "model": "claude"}'
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Response:

{
  "reply": "This code does...",
  "model": "claude-3-5-haiku",
  "tokens": 142
}
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That's it. No rate-limit surprises. No per-token billing anxiety.

What developers actually build with a $2/month API

1. Internal code review bots

The most common use case. A developer hooks this into their CI pipeline:

import requests

def review_pr(diff):
    response = requests.post(
        'https://simplylouie.com/api/chat',
        headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_KEY'},
        json={'message': f'Review this diff:\n{diff}'}
    )
    return response.json()['reply']
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They run it on every PR. At $20/month ChatGPT pricing, that's a business decision. At $2/month flat, it's free noise.

2. Telegram bots for dev teams 

const axios = require('axios');

bot.on('message', async (ctx) => {
  const reply = await axios.post('https://simplylouie.com/api/chat', {
    message: ctx.message.text
  }, {
    headers: { 'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_KEY' }
  });
  ctx.reply(reply.data.reply);
});
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Whole team uses it. One $2/month subscription.

3. Documentation generators

Point it at a codebase, get docs back:

for file in src/*.js; do
  curl -s -X POST https://simplylouie.com/api/chat \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{\"message\": \"Write JSDoc for:\\n$(cat $file)\"}" \
    | jq -r '.reply' > "docs/${file%.js}.md"
done
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Why flat-rate changes developer behavior

With token-based pricing, every API call is a cost decision:

  • Is this prompt worth 2,000 tokens?
  • Should I truncate the context to save money?
  • Do I need to log all calls to audit my bill?

With flat-rate:

  • Call it as many times as you want
  • Long context? Fine
  • Experimentation is free

The mental overhead of per-token billing is real. Developers self-censor their prompts to save fractions of cents. Flat-rate removes that entirely.

The comparison that matters

SimplyLouie OpenAI API ChatGPT Plus
Price $2/month Pay per token $20/month
Billing surprises Never Monthly anxiety Fixed
Team sharing Yes Per-key billing No
Model Claude 3.5 GPT-4o GPT-4o

Getting your API key

Sign up at simplylouie.com/developers

7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. $2/month after.

No per-token billing. No usage dashboards. No surprise invoices.

Just Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY and you're building.

Built this because I was tired of watching my API bill grow while my side project stayed small. Now 52 developers use it and I spend $0 worrying about billing.

50% of revenue goes to animal rescue. The other 50% keeps the servers running.

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