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My AI+SaaS costs were a black box, so I built a dashboard to track them

Over the last few months, I’ve been building AI-powered tools using a mix of OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, and a handful of other services.

At first, it was all manageable. $10 here, $20 there.
But then the billing spikes started. $120 one week. $370 the next.
And I had no idea where it was coming from.

Every tool had its own billing dashboard (some basically unusable), and none showed:

  • what project caused the spike
  • which model or feature was responsible
  • or even when exactly it happened

Worst offender: Google Cloud’s billing console for Gemini.
It felt like a test designed to punish anyone who wants to understand how their money is being spent.

So I hacked together a solution, a Stripe-style dashboard that connects to my AI tools and:

  • Tracks API + SaaS spend across services
  • Breaks it down by tool, project, and time
  • Sends usage alerts + burn forecasts before things get out of hand

It started as a personal pain project, but after posting on Reddit and talking to other indie hackers, I realized a lot of us are building into the same mess, especially with pay-as-you-go pricing becoming the norm.

🚀 I just opened up a waitlist for it here:
👉 https://aispendtracker.com/?utm_source=indiehackers

Would love your take on this, especially if you're also building something AI-related or juggling a growing stack of tools.

FEEDBACK HIGHLY APPRECIATED!!

on May 6, 2025