Why I built Stax: 4 weeks reading Reddit, one product.

I almost didn't build this. The first version of the idea was something else — a slightly nicer wrapper around the OpenAI dashboard. I sat on it for a week, didn't believe it, and instead opened a browser tab and started reading.

For four weeks I read every thread I could find about people complaining about their AI bill. r/ChatGPTPro, r/startups, r/devops, r/cscareerquestions, r/SaaS, r/CTO, the Indie Hackers forum, a few HN comment threads. I wasn't looking for product ideas. I was looking for the same complaint, said in a hundred slightly different ways.

Three of them kept repeating.

Complaint #1: "I have no idea what my actual bill is."

This was by far the most common. Not "my bill is too high" — that's the cliché. It was "I literally do not know what I am spending." A CTO would post a screenshot of one provider's invoice and ask the thread how they reconcile it against the Cursor seats, the Copilot enterprise plan, the ChatGPT Team subscription, and the personal Claude account they expensed.

Nobody had a good answer. The most upvoted reply was usually some variant of "I built a spreadsheet." The second most upvoted was "I just stopped looking."

My AI bill is roughly five tabs and a gut feeling. I have asked finance twice to put together a single number and both times it took two weeks and was already out of date. — paraphrased from a CTO of a 40-person startup, r/startups

This is the part that surprised me. The existing AI observability tools are real, they're well-built, and they are not solving this problem. They trace API requests. They show you cost per model, cost per endpoint, cost per token. None of them know that you also pay $20 a month for Cursor times five seats, or that your ChatGPT Team account has six seats but only three active users. Those bills don't pass through an API gateway, so they don't show up.

An observability tool can only see what it sees. What it can't see is the other half of your AI bill.

Complaint #2: "The person paying the bill can't read the tool."

The second pattern was quieter but everywhere once I noticed it. The CFO, the founder, the head of finance — the person who actually signs the invoice — would open one of these tools and immediately bounce. The UI is built for an engineer debugging a prompt. It talks about tokens and spans and traces. None of that maps to a budget review.

The result is a weird org dynamic where the person responsible for the cost can't see the cost without asking an engineer to make a chart, and the engineer doesn't have time to make charts so the chart never happens, and at the end of the quarter the bill is what the bill is.

I want this product to be readable by the person paying the bill in the first four minutes. Dollars. Dates. Per-team. Per-project. Per-person. Plain English. The word "token" doesn't appear in the marketing copy and only appears in one corner of the product, on the API detail page, where engineers will go looking for it on purpose.

Complaint #3: "My cost tracker is also a variable cost."

This one made me angry on people's behalf. Several threads had founders pointing out that their observability bill scales with their usage — so the month your usage spikes, your cost-control software also gets more expensive. One quote, slightly cleaned up:

The whole reason I wanted this tool was to control costs. Last month our usage tripled and the tool's bill tripled too. I am paying more to be told my bill is bigger. — founder, r/SaaS

This is a structural problem with how the category is priced, and nobody seems to want to be the one to break ranks. So I will. Stax is $49/mo, flat, regardless of provider count or volume. Connect 3 providers or 30. Spend $500 a month or $50,000. The Stax bill does not move.

What I built.

After four weeks of reading, the product almost wrote itself. The three complaints map cleanly to three product decisions:

• Connect API and subscriptions in the same dashboard, so the half of the bill that observability tools ignore is finally visible.
• Build the UI for the person who pays the bill, not the engineer who debugs the prompt. Dollars, budgets, team attribution.
• Charge a flat fee, even if our own infra costs scale with you. Cost software should not be a variable cost.

That's the entire bet. The first version is in build now, with the marketing site and waitlist live as of v0.1. The first 100 sign-ups lock in $29/mo founding-member pricing, forever. After that the price goes to $49 and stays there.

The thing I'm still figuring out.

The honest answer: provider coverage. I can't ship every integration on day one, so I'm shipping the most-requested two providers every fortnight. The waitlist form has a free-text pain-point field, and that field is — no exaggeration — the most useful thing I read every week. If your provider isn't on the list, that field is how you get it on the list.

Everything else I'll figure out by shipping and watching what breaks. If you're reading this and you've got the same frustration the Reddit threads do, the waitlist is the place to land. I'd rather hear from you now than after I've built something you don't want.