Alternatives
Products that do what CheapAI does
Drop-in AI API replacement — cheaper, same SDK
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Hello HN, I’ve always loved building frontend-only apps—those you can prototype over a weekend, host for free on GitHub Pages, and scale to millions of users. Unfortunately, AI-enabled apps complicate things, as exposing your OpenAI key to the world is obviously a no-go. This also means mobile developers often have to run their own servers. That’s why I built ServerlessAI, an API gateway that lets you securely call multiple AI providers directly from client side using OpenAI-compatible APIs. You can authenticate users through any identity provider, like Google or Apple, and set per-user…
2024 · serverlessai.dev
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Hi! I made OpenWearableAI - AI assistant/pendant assembled from widely available components. Here I shared how to do it yourself. Also it would be great to make it an opensource so that everyone can build and use it.
2024 · twitter.com
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Cut your Claude and GPT API costs by up to 96%
Jul 2026 · cheap-ai-apis.carrd.co
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Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!
2022 · whisperapi.com
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Affordable DeepSeek & Qwen API cheaper than official pricing
May 2026 · deeproute-api.duckdns.org
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Hey HN, I built an alternative to Google translate that's fast, accurate, and 1/30th the price. 20+ supported languages, not billed until 100k tokens, and already used thousands of times with real language learning users. The landing page has a demo for you to test performance yourself for free with no card required. (Also landing page says 1/13 the price because had to account for all 3 big names, with varying prices each). I built this as a workaround for my language learning startup, and it was perfect at a fraction of the cost. Hopefully it can help other devs in accessibility…
2023 · translateapi.web.app
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Hi! My OpenAI costs started going up recently and I hated how I couldn't figure out which model was costing me more? The OpenAI usage page (https://platform.openai.com/account/usage) gives a nice overall breakdown, but it doesn't go into detail about cost / model, token usage, and # requests. So I reverse engineered their API to make a better dashboard, and then made it free to use. Try it out and let me know what you think. Also please tell me what other features you wish existed here https://platform.openai.com/account/usage but doesn't yet.
2023 · llm.report
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I'm working on making it easier to use open-source AI models by providing simple APIs. Last week, OpenAI released Whisper v3, which showed improved performance across all its 100+ supported languages. We tried to optimize it as much as possible to be able to offer it for $0.0028 per minute (vs $0.006 on OpenAI). I hope it's helpful for someone: https://www.lemonfox.ai/apis/speech-to-text
2023
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AI API relay business — deploy in 5 mins, keep 90% margin
May 2026 · hrngda.gumroad.com
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See where your AI API cost & tokens go — no API key needed
Jul 2026 · reasoningdensity.com
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