I reduced my AI bill by 90% with 50 lines of code. Here's the trick.

Last month I was paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus. This month I'm paying $2/month for the same Claude API access.

The trick isn't a hack. It's just knowing where to look.

The 50-line wrapper

Here's the full code that routes my AI calls through a flat-rate proxy:

// ai-client.js — drop-in replacement for OpenAI SDK const fetch = require ( ' node-fetch ' );

const AI = { baseURL : ' https://simplylouie.com/api/v1 ' , apiKey : process . env . LOUIE_API_KEY ,

async chat ( messages , options = {}) { const res = await fetch ( ` ${ this . baseURL } /chat` , { method : ' POST ' , headers : { ' Authorization ' : `Bearer ${ this . apiKey } ` , ' Content-Type ' : ' application/json ' }, body : JSON . stringify ({ messages , model : options . model || ' claude-sonnet-4-5 ' , max_tokens : options . maxTokens || 1024 , stream : options . stream || false }) });

if ( ! res . ok ) { const err = await res .…