Tell HN: I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd done napkin math beforehand, so I knew it was probably a bug, but still. Turns out it was only partially a bug. The rest was me needing to rethink how I built this thing. Spent the next couple days ripping it apart. Making tweaks, testing with live data, checking results, trying again. What I found was I was sending API requests too often and not optimizing what I was sending and receiving. Here's what moved the needle, roughly big to small (besides that bug that was costin me a buck a day alone): - Dropped Claude Sonnet entirely - tested both models on the same data, Haiku actually performed better at a third
Why it failed
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd do
- Kind
- startup
- Status
- Shut down
- Inventor
- ok_orco
- Ended
- 2026
- Source
- hackernews