Hi Product Hunt Community!
As builders and founders, we love the “backend-less” stack: Stripe for payments, Supabase for data, Clerk for auth, PostHog for analytics. But the moment we add even a basic AI feature, we end up having to spin up a backend just to hide API keys, reimplement token-based per-user rate limits, set spend limits, and integrate with the application authentication. So we built Airbolt.
How does it work?
Sign up, add our SDK, and start making calls to OpenAI’s API from your app.
What sets Airbolt apart?
Zero backend: Drop in a prebuilt React chat component or lightweight client and you’re live.
Security by default: Short-lived JWTs, origin allowlists, IP throttling, and encrypted provider keys keep secrets out of your repo, app, and LLM context.
Control plane, no redeploys: Switch models, prompts, and per-project settings from the self-service dashboard.
Cost & abuse guardrails: Token-based per-user rate limits and spend caps so bad actors can’t spike your bill.
Vendor-neutral: Start with OpenAI today; swap providers/models from config, with automatic failover on the roadmap.
Cross-platform: Web today, native mobile and more coming soon.
Who is Airbolt For?
AI micro-SaaS founders: ship value faster with less maintenance burden and best practices built in.
Product managers: validate AI features this week, not next quarter.
Vibe coders: keep secrets out of your source, app, and LLM context while you move fast.
Prototypers & hackathon teams: demo in a night; safe by default so you don’t blow your API budget.
Extension & plugin builders (Chrome, WordPress, Discord/Slack bots): call LLMs from purely client environments.
Start building for free at airbolt.ai
We’re around for questions, tell us which use cases matter most and what you want us to ship next!
@mark_watson_28 I love it when I find a product that hits on a pain point I have. Thank you for launching, can’t wait to check this out!!!
Super slick way to cut backend hassle. How are you thinking about enterprise readiness (e.g. SOC 2) as teams scale on Airbolt?
@monzures it's something that we've considered but isn't a current top priority just based on our current users and their use cases. That said, we're constantly learning and reprioritizing. There's nothing preventing us.
Look forwarding to trying Airbolt out. @Lovable should integrate this into their stack asap.
Congrats on the launch!
So just thinking about this here... you could enable some really powerful capabilities with almost no additional prompt engineering effort. You already mentioned the control plane and guard rails which i assume could be proxy side but having hooks on backend as well as frontend really opens up a lot of options to dynamically alter llm inputs, outputs, and user interface.
I am thinking of my app switching to short form responses when screen space is tight. Maybe providing auto suggested responses in a button or dropdown on mobile devices but having that feature (and its associated llm overhead) toggled on desktop.
Genuinely excited by what you are starting here.
Prepare yourself for feature requests....from me :)
@derek_barnhart Awesome feedback. Mark and I were just talking about something similar the other day. While it would be super convenient for vibe coders to be able to configure everything from the dashboard, being able to dynamically set and adjust from the front end also unlocks so many use cases.
Congratulations on the launch guys, the product looks awesome. I really like the security focus, I think after seeing the downfall of Tea it's something the industry really needs!
What was the biggest learning curve for you in terms of the development?
Thanks @theo_crewe_read ! Honestly, we've been trying to move fast and initially maintaining both a fully open source and managed version was slowing us down. We've decided to focus on the managed/cloud for now (because that's what makes it truly as easy and fast as possible) and rethink our open source strategy. While we're still committed to open source and building in public, it might look different, like SDKs and libraries.
that's cool.
Are you going to work on providing direct LLM APIs within this SDK? This would be great to have some free test tokens or a way for us to buy any API from your platform itself - like a bundle for us to use.
And I am also new to coding but will it allow my end users to get their own LLM keys? Like if someone logs into my app and they will be given a certain limit on the tokens?
@chris7529 We are exploring some methods where we can provide keys to users so they don't have to bring their own. But of course in an easy to manage and secure fashion!
@chris7529 That's literally at the top of the backlog, we just hadn't done it to get this out ASAP without needing to integrate Stripe (and fund the free tokens ourselves.
Right now you can't have the end user provider their own keys but it's definitely something we could add!
Let's stay connected!
Love the zero backend approach—super convenient for AI micro-SaaS founders. The security features are impressive. Excited to try it and see how it simplifies prototyping. What use cases are you most excited about?
Thanks @sophia_tang3000 !