One of the two walls I hit building an AI product: i could see my total model bill, but not what any single customer cost me. and a heavy user on an "unlimited" plan can quietly turn your margin negative for weeks before you notice.
So i made a small free tool. you put in your model, tokens per interaction, and how much heavier your power users are, and it shows the cost of a typical vs heavy customer and the price that actually protects your margin. no signup to use it.
Building LaunchAI, and I keep coming back to one thing: most AI boilerplates nail the infrastructure (auth, gateway, RAG, agents) and then you still have two problems nobody warned you about. the app looks like a prototype, and you can't tell what a single customer actually costs you.
Curious whether that matches other people's experience. if you've used a starter kit or rolled your own, what was the thing you assumed would be handled that you ended up building yourself anyway? trying to make sure i'm solving the real gap, not the obvious one.
Most AI starter kits hand you infrastructure. LaunchAI hands you a product. Built on the stack you already use — Next.js + the Vercel AI SDK — it ships persistent streaming, multi-provider routing, agents, and RAG, plus two things the others skip: a production design system so your v1 looks shipped, and per-user token + cost metering so you can price it without a surprise invoice. One-time purchase, own the source, no subscription.
