u/mridhulpax

Hey everyone,

I'm a founder validating a service idea and I need honest feedback from people who've actually shipped AI products. Not looking to promote anything, genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth building into a proper business.

Here's what I keep hearing from teams running LLMs in production:

Their AI bill shows up as a single line item. $8K, $15K, $22K. no idea which feature drove it, which team spent the most, or whether staging burned more tokens than production. Finance asks engineering to explain the bill. Engineering shrugs. Nobody has answers until someone manually digs through API logs for two days.

Meanwhile, there are no spending caps. A developer testing a prompt in a loop burns $2K overnight. A new feature quietly 3x's token usage after launch. Nobody notices until the invoice hits.

The service I'm considering:

I come in, set up cost attribution infrastructure on your stack — so you can see AI spend broken down by feature, team, and environment in real time. Budget guardrails with alerts so nobody accidentally blows through limits. Weekly cost review to catch overruns early and suggest optimisations.

Core offering is a one-time fixed-fee setup (under a week), with an optional recurring monitoring tier for ongoing cost control.

I'm not building a SaaS product. This is done-for-you infrastructure work. I set it up, hand you the runbooks, and your team runs it from there.

I've already talked to a handful of CTOs and the signal so far is that the pain is real but timing matters, it only becomes urgent after a surprise bill or when a second team starts shipping AI features. Trying to figure out if that pattern holds broadly.

I'm a founder working in AI, and I've been helping companies build AI solutions and I see these same five problems with the AI Implementations:

1. No spend visibility The Bedrock/OpenAI/Claude/ bill is one line item. Nobody knows which feature, which team, or which environment is burning tokens. Finance asks "explain this $12K bill" and engineering has no answer.
2. Locked into one provider The whole codebase is hardwired to OpenAI's SDK. Switching to Anthropic or testing a cheaper model means weeks of refactoring. If OpenAI goes down, the product goes down. If Claude double thier pricing, then no way other than paying.
3. No budget guardrails A developer running a debug loop overnight racks up $2K and nobody notices until the invoice. There are no per-team or per-key spending caps. Shared key remians with a terminated employee till someone rotates the key.
4. PII leaking into model call Users type SSNs, credit card numbers, personal health info into the chatbot. That data goes straight to OpenAI's API with zero masking.
5. Setting this up yourself is a time sink - Tools like LiteLLM/Portkey/Bifrost exist (open source, powerful), but getting it production-ready with Postgres, Redis, health checks, fallback routing, and proper security takes an engineer 2-3 weeks. That's 2-3 weeks not spent on product.

The service I'm considering: We come in, deploy a production-grade LLM gateway on your infrastructure in under a week. You get cost attribution per team/feature/environment, multi-provider routing (swap models with zero code changes, support if code refactoring is needed), budget caps, PII masking, auto-failover, and full audit logging. Fixed fee. I hand it off with a runbook and 2 weeks of support. Done.

Not a SaaS. Not a subscription. Not a product you need to adopt. Just infrastructure setup, configured for your stack, by someone who's done it before.

What I'm trying to figure out:

- If you're running LLMs in production, are these real, urgent problems or "we'll get to it eventually" problems?

- Would you pay someone a fixed fee to just set this up, or would you assign it to an engineer internally?

- What would make this a no-brainer vs. a "maybe later"?

- Am I missing a pain point that's actually bigger than the ones I listed?

I'm not launching anything or dropping a link. Genuinely trying to understand if this is a service founders would pay for or if I'm solving a problem that's not painful enough.

Appreciate the honest takes.

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Edit: For context, the gateway is LiteLLM-based (open source, 100+ model providers supported). I'm not building a proprietary tool. The value is in the setup, configuration, security hardening, and handoff not the software itself.

Is there a place near Kochi to shoot a podcast? I need a studio with equipment.