Stax Is Ready. Here Is What We Shipped.

On March 3, 2026, Helicone was acquired by Mintlify and went into maintenance mode. About 16,000 organizations woke up that week with an API cost tracker that nobody is actively developing anymore. The timing is not lost on me — because the same month that happened, I was building the thing Helicone never had: a dashboard that tracks your subscriptions, not just your tokens. Here is what we shipped.

For the person who pays the bill

The original pitch for Stax was a single number: your total AI spend, across every vendor, in one place. That claim was half-true when I made it. The API side was real. The subscription side — Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Pro, ChatGPT Team, Perplexity — was manually tracked and not wired into the summary.

That changed this month. The tracked subscriptions UI is live. You add a vendor, a plan name, a seat count, and a monthly amount. Annual subscriptions divide by 12 automatically. Every number feeds into the summary endpoint alongside your live API data. The "one number" on the overview page now actually means one number.

Billing alerts are live too. You set a spend threshold — say, $2,000/mo — and Stax emails you when you're on track to blow through it. There is a daily cron sweep that checks every workspace. No polling, no checking the dashboard. You get an email before the bill surprises you.

The pricing has not changed: $49/mo, flat. We do not charge by seat, by provider count, or by usage volume. The cost of tracking your AI bill should not scale with your AI bill.

For the team

A few weeks ago, the only person who could see anything in Stax was the person who set up the account. That is not how a real finance tool works.

Workspace invites are live. You can add teammates, assign roles, and remove them when they leave. The invite flow handles email verification and lets a new user sign up directly from the invite link without needing to hit the waitlist.

The account audit log is live in Settings. It shows logins, password resets, email verifications, and active sessions — metadata only, no sensitive content. If someone on the team does something unexpected, you have a record.

This matters more than it sounds. The teams Stax is built for — 2 to 50 people, $500 to $5,000/mo in AI spend — usually have more than one person watching the bill. A founder who checks it, a CFO who approves it, maybe an ops lead who manages the vendor accounts. All three need visibility. Now they can have it.

For compliance and trust

This section is the least exciting to write and probably the most important for a finance tool that holds your API keys.

Email verification is live and required. You cannot log in until your email address is confirmed.

Account deletion is live with a 7-day grace period. You request deletion, Stax schedules the purge, and a cron job runs the actual wipe seven days later. If you change your mind inside that window, you can cancel it. When the purge runs, it removes your usage data, provider connections, and billing records — not just your user row.

GDPR data export is live. You request your data from the Privacy section in Settings, Stax packages it into a JSON file, and emails you a time-limited download link.

Email preferences are live. Every transactional email Stax sends — billing alerts, team invites, payment failure notices, export-ready notifications — respects an unsubscribe flag. The unsubscribe link is in every footer. The gate runs across all eight email senders. CAN-SPAM and GDPR baseline met.

Payment failure handling is live. If your card declines, Stax sends a dunning email. Your account does not silently keep running on a dead card while the bill accumulates.

None of this is flashy. All of it is necessary before a real customer can say yes.

What's next

The honest version:

We have 8 provider connections live — OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and four more via CSV upload (Mistral, ChatGPT Business, Perplexity, Google AI). The CSV path works but it is a workaround. Each of the four CSV vendors is on the roadmap for a proper sync integration. Priority order will come from what waitlist signups are actually using.

Stripe is in test mode. The checkout flow, the billing portal, the webhook handler — all built and verified end-to-end. We have not flipped the live switch yet. That happens when the invite-code gate comes down and the product is genuinely open.

The thing I am spending the most time on right now is distribution. The build is ahead of the audience. The /vs-helicone page we shipped this month is part of that — there is a real displacement window for teams that were on Helicone and need somewhere to go. But that is one channel, and I am actively working the others.