ProxAI - Hard budget caps for LLM APIs — one base_url change
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ProxAI is a transparent reverse proxy that enforces hard hourly/daily spending caps per LLM API client. Change one base_url — no SDK required. Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq, DeepSeek, and 5 more.
Over cap → 429 before the upstream is ever called. Worst case is your cap, not your credit card.
Self-hostable: single Go binary, ~10 MB Docker image (amd64/arm64), no telemetry. Or use the hosted beta at proxai.eu — free, no credit card.
AGPL-3.0. Built end-to-end with Claude Code.
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Hi Product Hunt! I'm the maker.
I built ProxAI after reading too many postmortems of agent loops and leaked keys burning API budgets overnight — while provider alerts are monthly and org-wide. It looked like a problem that deserved a hard, technical answer.
Two things I want to be upfront about:
1. I never got burned myself — I built this to prevent it, not recover from it.
2. This project is an experiment: it's built end-to-end with Claude Code, without me writing a single line of code. I specify, review, test and decide; the AI writes. The commit history shows it plainly.
Happy to discuss that workflow as much as the proxy. The self-host path is first-class: docker compose up, multi-arch image on ghcr.io, no telemetry, no account with me.
Happy to answer anything — would especially love feedback from anyone running LLM workloads in prod.
API cost becomes painful surprisingly fast. Curious—what pattern do you see most often when teams realize they actually need ProxAI instead of just monitoring usage manually?
@aryan787544 Ha, "surprisingly fast" is the whole thing
Monitoring is a rear-view mirror — you see the spend after it's gone. The moment people reach for ProxAI is always the same: a retry loop or runaway agent quietly torches the budget over a weekend, and the dashboard only tells them Monday.
So instead of drawing a scary graph, ProxAI just returns a hard 429 at your cap. Stops the bleeding in real time.
Fresh launch so I'm speaking to the problem I built it for more than a big sample — but does that weekend-surprise match what you've hit?
@matthieu_chartier1 That distinction between monitoring and prevention is interesting.
Feels like there's more to unpack than fits in a Product Hunt thread. If you're open to continuing the conversation, what's the best email to reach you?
@aryan787544 Glad the monitoring-vs-prevention angle landed — agreed it's deeper than a PH thread. You can reach me at j574nke2c@mozmail.com. Drop me a note on what you'd like to unpack and I'll come back properly.
@matthieu_chartier1 Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
@aryan787544 Monitoring is reactive — the dashboard tells you what you spent after the bill lands. The switch usually happens the moment a team needs a hard limit that acts on its own: a runaway loop burning budget overnight, keys handed to a team or an agent, or finance asking for a cap you can actually enforce instead of just watch.
That's the gap ProxAI fills: it sits in front of the API and returns a 429 the instant a budget is crossed, so the spend can't overrun.
Honest caveat — it's early (v0.1.0, launched this week), so this is the pattern I built it around more than a claim about lots of teams. Curious if it matches what you've seen.