Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Ctx, save tokens by loading only the relevant tools
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,…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Hey HN! Tokencost is a utility library for estimating LLM costs. There are hundreds of different models now, and they all have their own pricing schemes. It’s difficult to keep up with the pricing changes, and it’s even more difficult to estimate how much your prompts and completions will cost until you see the bill. Tokencost works by counting the number of tokens in prompt and completion messages and multiplying that number by the corresponding model cost. Under the hood, it’s really just a simple cost dictionary and some utility functions for getting the prices right. It also accounts for…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Conduit▲137Fix the tool-list bloat slowing your AI agent
Jun 2026 · toolport.app · its alternatives →
- 3
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 · its alternatives →
- 4
Howdy all. I'm Zack :wave:. I've been thinking about the problem of misguided AI pull requests and figured I'd throw a possible solution out there for feedback. Basically, CleverCrow lets supporters give tokens to a GitHub repo (or set of issues in that repo) for the maintainers to use to build/fix stuff. The fun implementation challenges have been around implementing the pooling dynamics and keeping the maintainers in charge while the backers are motivated to support their work.
Jun 2026 · clevercrow.io · its alternatives →
- 5
I code on Claude's pay as you go API and started budgeting my token usage with my own CLI wrapper. Basically I set a budget for a task that I'm working on in my project: Task: "Fix mobile responsiveness" Budget: $3.00 and the budget updates after each prompt: Task: "Fix mobile responsiveness" Budget: $2.34 / $3.00 78% It helps keep an eye on my spending when working on projects.
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
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 · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi HN, I was once given the advice: Don't waste expensive frontier model credits (GPT/Claude/etc.) on bulk work. Send the boring, repetitive, high-volume jobs to a smaller model, and save the expensive prompts for when you actually need frontier-level reasoning. I complained and told my manager that I shouldnt have to think about using certain models for certain coding tasks, and that one model should handle everything. Well, here we are anyway. If anyone needs a place to absolutely abuse an LLM with high-volume tasks, come beat ours up at https://yolo-auto.com. Here are…
Jul 2026 · yolo-auto.com · its alternatives →
- 8
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 · its alternatives →
- 9
I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on called Frugal Tokens. I originally built it because I was curious to see how much all of my sessions cost and how much cache misses affected that spend. I’d noticed people had widely different spend profiles and wanted to better understand what might contribute to that. As I’ve worked on this, the tool has grown to show more usage patterns across all of your sessions. It shows overall usage, estimated working time and overlapping sessions, and where your spend is coming from across models and cache misses. I also have a few session level…
Aug 2026 · demo.frugaltokens.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hey HN - there are lots of tools to understand how many tokens you use and how much it costs, but we haven't found any that tell you where those tokens are going! Decant helps you understand what you are spending tokens on (context gathering, planning, code, chat, etc), so you can optimize it.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
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 · its alternatives →
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- 13WB
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 · its alternatives →
- 14
- 15CD
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 · its alternatives →
- 16
Compress AI prompts, cut token costs by 15%
Feb 2026 · its alternatives →
- 17AF
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 · its alternatives →
- 18AB
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 · its alternatives →
- 19
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 · its alternatives →
- 20
I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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GitHub▲1Cut LLM token costs 30–60% — local, instant, zero API calls
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
See every token. Fix every prompt. Learn why it works.
Apr 2026 · tokenlens.live · its alternatives →
- 23WW
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 · its alternatives →
- 24
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 · its alternatives →
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- TokenMaxxer – track every AI token you spend across your coding tools alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →