# AI Pricing Hub

## Plain-English Version

AI Pricing Hub is a live price book for AI and API costs.

It tells builders how much popular APIs cost, what the usage limits are, what changed recently, and which provider is cheapest for a specific workload.

## Who Pays

- AI app builders.
- Automation agencies.
- Micro-SaaS founders.
- Developer tool teams.
- No-code consultants.
- Finance or operations teams watching API spend.

## MVP

- Track 30-50 high-demand AI and automation APIs.
- Store price, unit, free tier, limits, context window, output limit, region notes, and last checked date.
- Offer API endpoints for pricing lookup and cost estimation.
- Offer CSV export.
- Send weekly pricing-change alerts.
- Publish a free web calculator as the lead magnet.

## Why It Matters

AI and API products can become unprofitable when usage grows or provider pricing changes. Many builders compare pricing manually through docs, spreadsheets, and forum posts.

The monthly value is simple: reduce surprise bills and help teams choose cheaper API routes.

## International Fit

Docs, examples, and alert summaries should launch in:

- English,
- Spanish,
- Portuguese,
- French,
- German.

## Payment Setup

Start with Stripe Checkout or Payment Links.

Use Stripe Billing for metered API usage after the first paying users. Offer annual invoice payment for teams that do not want card billing.

## Pricing Test

- Free: 250 requests/month and public calculator.
- Developer: `$29/mo`.
- Pro: `$99/mo`.
- Team Feed: `$299/mo`.

## Score

Weighted score: `90`.

## Validation Plan

1. Publish a free calculator for 10 popular APIs.
2. Share it with AI builders, automation agencies, and indie hacker communities.
3. Ask users which APIs they manually compare today.
4. Add paid historical pricing and alerts.
5. Sell before adding a complex dashboard.

## Risks

- Pricing pages can change format.
- Some providers do not publish every limit clearly.
- Must avoid inaccurate cost estimates.
- Needs consistent checking discipline.

## Best First Endpoint

```text
GET /v1/prices?provider=openai&product=model
GET /v1/estimate?provider=openai&input_tokens=1000000&output_tokens=100000
GET /v1/changes?since=2026-01-01
```

## Local App

This folder now contains a working static web app and Vercel-compatible API endpoint.

```bash
npm run update:data
npm run update:news
npm run update:all
npm test
npm run serve
```

Open `http://localhost:4180`.

## What It Does

- Fetches current public pricing pages from official provider sources.
- Extracts model, input price, cached input price, and output price where the page exposes parseable pricing rows.
- Falls back to seeded records when a provider page changes or cannot be confidently parsed.
- Shows source health so users can see whether a row was extracted, seeded, or needs review.
- Calculates monthly cost for a workload and ranks cheapest models for the same workload.
- Generates an AI news feed from public RSS/Atom sources in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
- Presents launch recommendations for domain, hosting, and no-subscription monetization.
- Exposes a Vercel serverless endpoint at `/api/prices`.

## Domain Shortlist

Availability was checked on June 11, 2026 with RDAP/WHOIS signals. Registrar checkout is still the final source of truth.

Primary domain: `aipricinghub.com`.

Use `AI Pricing Hub` as the public brand because it is clearer for SEO than the original `APICost Atlas` name.

## Hosting Recommendation

Use Cloudflare Pages first:

- Free static hosting is enough for this build.
- Custom domains are supported.
- The app refreshes pricing and news during builds with `npm run update:all`.
- The site still works without serverless functions because it reads `data/providers.json` and `data/news.json`.

Use Vercel if you specifically want the `/api/prices` serverless endpoint running in production without adapting it to Cloudflare Workers.

## Domain Delegation

The domain was purchased at Spaceship. Delegate it to Cloudflare:

1. In Cloudflare, add `aipricinghub.com` as a new website on the Free plan.
2. Copy the two Cloudflare nameservers assigned to the zone.
3. In Spaceship, open `aipricinghub.com` > Advanced DNS > Nameservers > Change.
4. Choose custom nameservers and paste the two Cloudflare nameservers.
5. Save and wait for Cloudflare to show the domain as active.
6. In Cloudflare Pages, add `aipricinghub.com` and `www.aipricinghub.com` as custom domains for the Pages project.

## News Feed

The news feed is generated into `data/news.json` from:

- English: MIT Technology Review AI, TechCrunch AI, The Verge AI, VentureBeat AI.
- Spanish: Xataka IA, Genbeta IA.
- Portuguese: Canaltech IA, Olhar Digital IA.

The top three launch languages are English, Spanish, and Portuguese because they cover the strongest mix of global developer demand, Latin American and Spanish-language founders, and Brazil/Portugal digital-business traffic.

## Monetization Without Subscription

Start with:

1. EthicalAds as the preferred privacy-first developer ad network once traffic is large enough.
2. Carbon Ads as a second developer-audience option if accepted.
3. Ko-fi for international one-time donations through Stripe or PayPal.
4. Disclosed affiliate links for relevant API credits, hosting, observability, and developer tooling.
5. A small sponsor mention in the source monitor only after traffic exists. Do not sponsor model rankings.

## Deployment

The project is intentionally dependency-free. It can deploy as a free static project from this folder.

```bash
npm run update:all
npm run build:static
```

For Cloudflare Pages direct upload, upload the generated `dist` folder.

For Cloudflare Pages Git deploys, connect a Git repository, set the build command to `npm run build:static`, and use `dist` as the output directory.

For Vercel, `vercel.json` already runs `npm run update:all` during build, and `/api/prices` refreshes official pricing sources at runtime with cache headers.

## Current Online Demo

The app is currently exposed through a no-login Cloudflare Quick Tunnel:

```text
https://valium-means-jessica-limits.trycloudflare.com/
```

This is a free temporary tunnel, not a permanent production domain. It stays available while the local Python server and detached `screen` tunnel keep running on this machine.

Stop the temporary deployment:

```bash
screen -S apicost-atlas-tunnel -X quit
kill 11252
```

Logs:

```bash
tail -f /tmp/apicost-atlas-tunnel.log
```