... have a free tier that costs me real money every time someone uses it, and no way of knowing who's using it. I'm looking for the least invasive way to cap it. The background: I took the account requirement off the front of my product a few weeks ago. You can now use the expensive part of it without signing in, and you only make an account at the point where you'd want to keep the output ... ... enthusiasm. Someone running it eight times in an hour is either draining the budget or is the most interested person who's visited all month, and from the server side those two are identical. So I've set the cap

... building a tool that centralizes retry limits, spend caps, and alerts across every cron job or agent you run, instead of wiring guardrails into each project separately. The idea came from noticing how often solo devs and small teams only find out an agent looped or retried for hours after the bill shows up. Most people patch this per project (a retry cap

... documents FieldSpec and ColumnSpec property by property, including the rule that values come back exactly as printed. templateId is gone from it. You can run a page on the site without signing up, and there is no longer a cap on that. If you are storing results, store values whole and keep cells beside it rather than flattening the two back together. The whole point of the split is that your half never has to make room for mine again ... ... that fails when a path shows up in one and not the other, or is it true by construction? Invariants like that hold right up until someone adds a write path that only touches one side. Separately, removing the cap

... what happens when the user closes your app? Two weeks ago, on July 15, China rolled out rules specifically aimed at curbing emotional dependence on AI companion bots. Platforms now have to detect distress, intervene in a crisis, cap excessive use, and hand users real control over their data. California, meanwhile, became the first U.S. state to pass legislation regulating companion chatbots, forcing developers to build in actual safety protocols. If you're building anything that touches people's emotional ... ... inside your app if they can only feel understood while they're talking to your model you haven't solved loneliness. You've made it more comfortable to stay lonely. You've built a very sophisticated waiting room. The alternative

... there's a distinction I keep thinking about: apps built with AI (Cursor, Claude, Copilot writing the code) vs apps that depend on AI APIs at runtime to function. I'm in the first camp. I used AI-assisted coding heavily to build Briskly (a cleaning app that scans your room and generates a timed task list), but the app itself makes zero LLM API calls. The scanning runs on Apple's Vision framework, entirely on-device. No tokens ... ... pricing volatility bitten anyone yet? Anyone shipped with local/on-device models (Apple's Foundation Models, Core ML, quantised open models)? How was the quality gap in practice? Where's the line for you? Which features genuinely need a frontier model vs

... only found three pixel-level bugs we'd been staring past for months, but wrote commit messages more thorough than most postmortems. Thank you. Fixed The reading pane is now the reading pane. We were capping the message at 840px wide, which meant a big monitor bought you one skinny column of text, a lot of empty pane, and a scrollbar floating somewhere in the middle of the screen. Cap

... without needing the limit to force it. Comment from Alexander Bickov(@bickov): @alpertayfurr   @rabnoor_s   @abdullah_javaid3  Half-formed and overwritten beats waiting for it to land clean, that's a fair trade. The one-line cap gets harder to hold onto though once entries start life messy instead of already resolved. Comment from Rabnoor Singh(@rabnoor_s): @abdullah_javaid3  The length limit doing the filtering is the most portable thing in this thread. A format ... ... where the wrong thing physically does not fit beats any rule you have to remember, because the rule fails exactly when you are busy, which is the same moment the decision is being made. Has the one line cap

... poles: two weeks of daily posting, then three weeks of silence when real work took over. The silence weeks were the expensive ones. For a product nobody has heard of, visibility decays fast. What finally worked for me was capping it: 2.5 hours a week, structured. One 90-minute block on Sunday to write everything for the week while I still have context. Fixed publishing slots (Tue/Thu/Sat) so nothing depends on my mood. Ten minutes a day replying to people ... ... space, which drives more profile visits than my own posts do some weeks. And once a month I re-queue my best performer, because new followers never saw it. The cap

... agents on is coding-related, side hustle SEO tools, so worst case is a bad diff I catch on review. No customer sends, no charges, nothing touching production without me in the loop first. So "reach" for me caps out at one person: me, reading output before it ships. But your framing makes me suspicious of my own answer. "Nothing reaches past me" is true right up until you automate something you didn't think of as customer-facing ... ... rather than hold the line forever. A stalled job that took the cautious path is recoverable. A stalled job that just sat there is a support ticket. Comment from Dale Mooney(@dalemooney): @alex_amancio_candoa_   @aadilghani  Constant versus

... originally started looking for alternatives because I was tired of paying subscriptions that limit experimentation through credits, tokens, and usage caps

... This is the load-bearing part. Two Continues from now doesn't mean two hopes between my taps, the loop is grinding to  earn  them. Each milestone PR runs the real build and real QA, and two capped inner loops handle failure entirely out of my sight: Build-fix loop.  Build fails the agent reads the failing build log, fixes the root cause, pushes to the  same  branch (never a new PR), and the build ... ... loop.  QA drives the app like a user. It fails the agent fixes the issue and re-runs QA on the same branch. This loop gets its  own budget , separate from the build loop. Each loop is capped

... multi-file tasks daily. Heavy users all converge on the same number, just from different directions. The top individual tier for Cursor, Claude Code, and Windsurf all land at or near $200/month once you actually need the higher usage caps, which is a strange coincidence given how differently these products are architected and built. Heavy users on subscription tools typically end up moving to the $100-200/month tiers to avoid quota walls, and open-source agents on usage-based ... ... model pricing run about the same, $100-200/developer/month in token spend, once you're going all-day against a frontier model. The pricing model looks different on the surface (subscription vs

... Been building NexQL for a while and wanted to open this up for actual discussion rather than just a launch post. What it is: a PostgreSQL extension for VS Code database explorer, SQL notebooks, real-time dashboard, and an AI assistant, all without leaving the editor. The part I care most about: AI never executes SQL on its own. Every suggestion lands in a notebook cell for you to review and run. Production connections default to read-only, queries ... ... built-in MCP server so external agents (Copilot, Claude Desktop, Cursor) can query your database the same safe, read-only way. Core is free and MIT-licensed paid tiers exist to fund development and lift a few daily caps

... flow; sensitive ones (payments, outbound messages, public posts) escalate to you for approval. The goal is that the only things reaching you are the things that genuinely need a human. Hard money and authority controls. Per-task budgets that cap and stop, per-staff usage quotas, and a total circuit breaker that pauses automatically at a threshold. Every action is logged, auditable, and stoppable. A lead that owns the outcome. Instead of a peer-to-peer mesh where responsibility ... ... each time. Money and anything touching production are the other two, but the byline one is the one I'd never soften, because a bad deploy is revertible and a bad sentence in my voice isn't. On manager vs

... renames or restructures an element and a test's selector breaks, the engine diagnoses the failure, patches the broken selector/wait, verifies the new selector against the live DOM , then re-runs the test until it passes (or a retry cap is hit) and writes the fix back as a local CLI or a CI GitHub Action that opens a patch PR. How it works Four layers drive a LangGraph repair loop: CLI core the single entry point (e2e-healer); everything ...

... with when identifying what makes a design distinctive. The "anti-slop" filter (which catches generic phrases like "clean and modern") now covers more filler words, so the final output stays specific and evidence-based. Each analysis step has output caps to keep things focused fewer words, more signal. Comment from Tina Chhabra(@tina_chhabra): the "anti-slop" filter that catches generic phrases like "clean and modern" is a detail more AI tools need. most AI analysis outputs are 90% filler ... ... words that sound smart but say nothing. capping

... Google recently announced and pushed two new models into the Gemini API. For informational purposes, I am breaking down what's confirmed vs. what's just early testing chatter so far. Nano Banana 2 Lite (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image): Text-to-image in around 4 seconds. $0.034 per 1K-resolution image. Positioned as the direct replacement for the original Nano Banana. (gemini-2.5-flash-image) Rolling out across AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini Enterprise, and consumer surfaces. (Search ... ... editing: now you can refine a generated video with plain language instead of re-prompting from scratch. Multimodal input (text/image/video combined) to keep a scene consistent. $0.10/sec of video output, same rate as Veo 3.1 Fast. Confirmed limitations: Capped

... nika): @danny_christensen  Sorry, I optimised it already for users who will be using the plugin. I am gonna add the description. Comment from Danny Christensen(@danny_christensen): @busmark_w_nika Both actually. When i look at competitors pricing, i dont know why they chose that number. maybe they are bleeding money, maybe they are greedy, maybe they just guessed. So i stopped using it as a reference. Im convinced its the same with features, comparing yourself to others ... ... what?" not a discount. Your 59 annual is solid if you can anchor it against the cost of a distraction habit (lost productivity, screen time apps that charge more). What's the one thing your plugin does that free alternatives

... Basedash s AI analyst is now more rigorous about the kinds of questions that trip up most tools. It s more careful with ambiguous metrics, distinguishes named rates from their supporting deltas, notices when a data source is stale versus fresh, and double-checks compound, multi-part answers before responding so you get answers you can trust, with the caveats that matter. We also taught it production-tested SQL gotchas for the databases you actually use Postgres, Supabase, Redshift, Snowflake ... ... Server, MySQL, PlanetScale, BigQuery, and more so the queries it writes run cleanly the first time, with fewer dialect-specific errors. Set a spending limit on AI usage Organization admins can now set an optional cap

... made them succeed or fail? For those who've sold into small/mid-sized businesses, what's usually the biggest blocker to adoption price, integration effort, or something else? Is there a feature here that seems like a "nice to have" versus something that would actually change behavior? Would appreciate any perspective, whether from experience building similar things or just as someone who's dealt with this as a customer or business owner. Comment from Alessandro Lusardi(@alelusardi): I am currently building ... ... live on PH Aug 22, so this thread's been good practice at saying it in one paragraph.) Comment from Demetrio Koro(@aktivist): siOsi upload one selfie and it reads your 12-season color type, undertone, gold vs

... locally (llama.cpp sidecar) and Groq's openai/gpt-oss-120b on the cloud side ... both open-weight. Once we stop trying to pick "the best model" and just treat them as different tools wired into a router, the "open-weight vs frontier" framing kind of goes away. For my own coding work I'm a Claude Code daily-driver, so my personal stack is totally different from what my product ships. But the Kilo takeaway "matching the run to the job" tracks both ... ... from fmerian(@fmerian): "Most teams will probably end up with routing rules, not a favorite model." exactly. see this poll after @Github Copilot moved to a usage-based billing model. most teams (61%) are already considering an hybrid approach: cap

... write but it's absolutely time I don't want to "save" by reverting to generic "listen to signals and post something in response" tools Owned community engagement we launched Raccoon o'Clock: a regular office hour (capped at 15 people for now) for founders to loosely chat about VC readiness and exchange fundraising tips. Pic is from the first one :) we're thinking about launching a Discord server, similarly for founders to support one another with fundraising and sales ... ... works. Your top 1% on r/indiehackers proves it. On the Discord: I'd hold off. It's easy to launch and brutal to keep alive, and a half-dead server reads worse than none. Raccoon o'Clock capped

... both content and   product work.   2. Google Search Console I basically live in it. For anything SEO, it's the only honest source of truth   about what's actually happening vs. what I assume is happening.   3. Ahrefs keyword and competitor

... Does it work with [tool X]?" If it supports MCP, yes. ChatGPT, Claude Code, Codex, all confirmed. More being added. "How is it different from Custom Instructions or Projects?" Custom instructions are a workaround, not a solution. They're capped at a few hundred words and static across all your projects. Both projects and custom instructions and locked to one tool. If you switch to Claude Code from Codex, or from Gemini to Perplexity, you start from scratch ... ... AppSumo: https://appsumo.8odi.net/m4n0da What other questions can I answer? Eager to listen to your objections or concerns. Comment from Nolan Vu(@nolan_vu): The custom instructions comparison hits the nail on the head. That 500-word static cap

... from groups You can give a group its own AI context, and it now flows into chat, chart-editing, and automation agents whenever a member of that group is interacting. If different teams think about your data differently engineering versus sales versus