Basal
Know what your AI-built project costs before you build it
22 followers
Know what your AI-built project costs before you build it
22 followers
Most people think Lovable is $25/month. It is, until you hit your message limit mid-project.
Replit credits run out. Claude Opus can rack up $800+ in API fees before a single line of code ships.
Basal fixes this. Paste your project description, get a full cost breakdown: subscription, overages, API spend, and dev time, across 6 AI platforms. Agencies get client-ready proposals with margin baked in.
Know what it costs before you build it.
Hey PH 👋
I built Basal because I kept seeing the same problem: developers and agencies quoting projects without accounting for what AI tools actually cost to use.
Most people think Lovable is $25/month. It is — until you go over your message limit mid-project. Replit's 1,000 AI credits run out faster than you'd expect. Claude Opus on a complex project can
rack up $800+ in API fees before you count a single hour of dev time. Nobody talks about this clearly.
Basal fixes that.
You paste your project description. Basal detects your features, scores the complexity, and runs tool-specific formulas that include subscription cost, usage overages, and developer time — for
Lovable, Replit, Cursor, Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, GPT-4o, Gemini, and traditional development.
The output is a cost range, timeline, confidence level, and a breakdown of where your money actually goes (subscription vs usage vs labour). Pro users get a shareable client-facing link, a clean proposal page with your agency branding, plain-English feature summary, and investment estimate. No technical internals exposed.
What I'd love feedback on:
→ Does the tool-specific cost breakdown feel accurate for your experience building with these tools?
→ What's missing from the estimation model?
Try it free at trybasal.com — 7-day trial.
Happy to answer anything! Ask away! 🙏
Running quotes for clients used to mean a spreadsheet, a guess, and a prayer.
We've been quietly building the features agency owners actually asked for - and today we're shipping two big ones.
You can now drop in a PDF brief directly.
Client hands you a 12-page requirements doc? Just upload it. Basal reads it, extracts what matters, and turns it into a structured estimate in seconds — no more copy-pasting walls of text.
And your quotes are now ready for clients.
Set your agency margin (percentage or flat), pick the output currency, and Basal instantly generates a client-facing proposal with your markup baked in; no internal cost breakdown exposed, just a clean investment figure.
If you want to manage expectations upfront, flip on the price range toggle and Basal will show a confidence-adjusted low–high range instead of a single number.
Everything recalculates without re-running AI, so tweaking your margin for a specific client takes seconds, not a re-run.
For agencies juggling international clients: 40+ currencies supported with live exchange rates.
Basal is built for the people writing the quotes, not just reading them.
Get your 7 day free trial and then jsut $19 / month: https://www.trybasal.com
I think a lot of people still treat AI tool costs as a rounding error until they hit a limit in the middle of a project. Having clearer visibility upfront seems genuinely useful.