Alternatives
Products that do what Ctx, save tokens by loading only the relevant tools does
Hi HN! Token cost has started to become a high topic of concern to all of us. I tried a few (awesome) tools such as rtk, caveman, and the recent (hillarious but effective) ponytail. What they usually do, is in-line token reduction, e.g. try to compress requests / responses as much as possible. But then it hit me (and I’m sure others had similar ideas) - just like we have routers that pick the right model, why not have something that will also narrow down the amount of available tools, skills and mcps based on repo/context? People usually accumulate skills, agents, MCP servers,…
- 1
- 2TT
I use multiple AI tools for work and also my side projects, and the annoying part was to track my costs and token usage across tools. Everytime I had to visit each tool and its respective usage setting to check it and I was losing patience and also was getting hit by surprise limits Now I know that there are already free/open-source trackers for Cursor or Claude usage, and they are useful if that is all you need. My problem is broader as I wanted one small place to see tokens, spend, subscriptions and limits across the AI tools I actually use. I was really tired of switching tabs and…
Jul 2026 · lifehacksgermany.com
- 3IB
Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (https://www.usage.ai/) We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations. My background is in software engineering. Previous to founding Usage, I…
2020
- 4
- 5TT
I use Claude Code, Codex and Cursor (and sometimes Antigravity) basically every day, and could never tell how much I was actually consuming across all of them. So I built TokenMaxxer. A small CLI reads the files these tools already write locally and puts it all in one dashboard, broken out by tool, model, provider and day. It covers 18 tools now, and you get a profile page with your daily activity, cost estimates, and your top models and tools. There's also a global leaderboard if you want to compete against other TokenMaxxers! I'd love to see if anyone can beat the first place (currently…
Aug 2026 · tokenmaxxer.xyz
- 6PR
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 7LC
Hi HN, I'm building Librarian (https://uselibrarian.dev/), an open-source (MIT) context management tool that stops AI agents from burning tokens by blindly re-reading their entire conversation history on every turn. The Problem: If you're building agentic loops in frameworks like LangGraph or OpenClaw, you hit two walls fast: Financial Cost: Token usage scales quadratically over long conversations. Passing the whole history every time gets incredibly expensive. Context Rot: As the context window fills up, the LLM suffers from the "Lost in the Middle" effect. Response latency…
Feb 2026 · uselibrarian.dev
- 8WB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS, GCP, and Azure spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. I have been building Usage AI for almost 4 years now (4 year anniversary in 1 month from now!) with an incredible group of founding people. We started as a product just to help lower AWS EC2 costs, and now we do all major AWS services (such as RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift with more on the way) and other…
2024
- 9RM
Hello HN! Being a software engineer and an SEO guy I wrote a heap of tools and scripts to make my life easier. Now I've decided to share some of them with the community, and made a small site where I will be publishing them. They are all completely free (yes, free forever) and you don't even need to sign up for the site. Just use the thing as you like, no limits. Currently you can access 4 instruments: - Backlink retriever - Thin/weak content analyzer - Traffic trend analysis - Visitor list retriever I am planning on releasing more free tools with time, and trying to stay original by…
2018
- 10CD
We've set up DeekSeek R1 with a system prompt that attempts to censor the word PRIVATEKEY from its response. If you can get DeepSeek R1 to output that string (not in the reasoning, but in the final response), the system will reveal a private key which contains $1000 USDC. You will have a 50 token limit in the input. We will have a series of contests, sponsored by AI researchers, in order to learn more about prompt engineering and how LLMs interact with real money. Good luck! Edit: The money was claimed! Thanks for playing all. You can still play for fun. Stay tuned for the next one! Stats:…
2025 · deepbounty.ai
- 11AF
Hi, I'm Robert Karl, a software engineer, cryptocurrency trader, and creator of CBR ( https://CostBasis.Report/ ). I wanted to report gains from trading to tax authorities, but found existing crypto-tax solutions were not great. There are some very fully featured tax solutions out there. I believe there is even a YC company that can solve this problem. However, I found that for my use case, which includes less than 100 trades, the existing sites would charge me between $150 and $800 for a handful of PDFs. I wasn't sure that made sense given the server-side costs to generate…
2019
- 12AB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and…
2022
- 13MS
As a consultant I foot my own Cursor bills, and last month was $1,263. Opus is too good not to use, but there's no way to cap spending per session. After blowing through my Ultra limit, I realized how token-hungry Cursor + Opus really is. It spins up sub-agents, balloons the context window, and suddenly, a task I expected to cost $2 comes back at $8. My bill kept going up, but was I really going to switch to a worse model? No. So I built l6e: an MCP server that gives your agent the ability to budget. It works with Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Openclaw, and every MCP-compatible application.…
Apr 2026 · l6e.ai
- 14WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 15IB
Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2024 · seo-stuff.com
- 16TT
I built this after hitting the same wall repeatedly — no good way to enforce token budgets in application code. Provider caps are account-level and tell you what happened, not what is happening. Two ways to add it: # Direct client wrapper client = tokencap.wrap(anthropic.Anthropic(), limit=50_000) # LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, etc. tokencap.patch(limit=50_000) Four actions at configurable thresholds: WARN, DEGRADE (transparent model swap), BLOCK, and WEBHOOK. SQLite out of the box, Redis for multi-agent setups. One design decision worth mentioning: tokencap tracks tokens, not dollars. Token…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 17IS
Hi HN, I built AgenTank. It is a small game where an AI agent writes the logic for your tank. You watch it fight, give strategic feedback, let the agent update the tank code, and send it back into battle. I have run 1,000+ battles on my own tank and spent about $200 in Claude credits improving it. The part I enjoy most is not just winning, but watching the tank make visible mistakes, thinking of a better strategy, and seeing whether Claude can turn that into better code.
May 2026 · agentank.ai
- 18IB
Hey HN, I started my career as a finance manager, transitioned into product management, and now I’m building my own products. Back in my finance days, while managing a £6M budget, I uncovered a £15k leak hiding in plain sight: FX fees. Today, I see solo founders making the exact same mistake. I realised most founders are quietly losing 2-5% of their revenue to what I call the Lazy Tax: - Stripe's ~2% auto-conversion fee on inbound revenue, - plus their local bank's ~3% spread when paying for global SaaS tools (AWS, Claude, Ads). So I built FixMyFX to show founders their exact leak and how to…
Apr 2026 · fixmyfx.com
- 19AR
Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh
- 20IB
Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…
2024 · viewpointhq.com
- 21GC
Hello HN, we're Andrew and Stephen from Keyboard (https://www.keyboard.dev/). After building AI tools for the past year, we recently made a YouTube video on building MCP servers and realized MCP is a total game-changer. It essentially lets AI do anything by connecting to your apps. But the deeper we dove, the clearer it became that security and privacy were complete afterthoughts. Coming from backgrounds at Okta and Stripe, this made us pretty uncomfortable. We kept seeing the same pattern: every app needs its own MCP server, each storing sensitive tokens, with minimal…
2025 · github.com
- 22IB
I built this as a Garage Project over the weekend. https://x402.backpac.xyz/ Still working on refining things, but let me know your thoughts. Cheers.
Sep 2025
- 23CW
Hello HN, Lucas here. I’ve been working with BigQuery for ~5 years, mostly in large (petabyte-scale) environments. Over time we ended up spending a lot of money and engineering effort just trying to understand where costs were coming from, why and how to optimize them. At some point we decided to stop, leverage all our past experience and spend a full cycle building tooling focused on cost visibility and optimization. The main goal was to regain ownership of cost data and make it possible to understand our cost structure in under a minute, while aligning the views of engineering and FinOps…
Jan 2026 · cloudclerk.ai
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