AWS reminded me why I built $2/month flat-rate AI

This week, a story hit Hacker News: "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left."

It has 500+ points and 400+ comments. Developers are nodding along.

The story isn't really about AWS. It's about billing that punishes you for using a tool correctly.

The AWS billing problem is the same as the ChatGPT billing problem

With AWS, you provision something, forget a setting, and wake up to a $400 surprise.

With ChatGPT API, you call it in a loop, forget a rate limit, and wake up to a $200 charge you didn't expect.

Both tools are powerful. Both have pricing models that require you to understand your usage perfectly before you use them. That's a tax on experimentation.

If you're scared to run your code because you don't know what it will cost, that's a broken product.

What I built instead

I built SimplyLouie — a flat-rate Claude API wrapper. $2/month. No usage meters. No surprise bills.…