AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Frugon – Find which LLM calls a cheaper model could handle (local, MIT)
I started leaning in on AI heavily this year, as I wanted to get more done autonomously, but then my token usage climbed dramatically to the point where my weekly quota would run out before the end of the week, sometimes a couple of days into the week. I realised I had to do something about it else I'd have to double my spend. So I decided to start tracking my cost per task type. This revealed that a lot of my spend went to searches/scans or simple things like scouting tasks. I then decided to turn this into a simple CLI tool that can be used to read your OpenAI-style logs locally, and…
Frugon is a CLI tool that analyzes OpenAI-style logs to identify which language model API calls could run on cheaper alternatives. It reads usage data locally, compares costs across models using LiteLLM pricing and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
- 2
LLM 0.26 is out with the biggest new feature since I started the project: support for tools. You can now use the LLM CLI tool—and Python library—to grant LLMs from …
2025 · simonwillison.net · its alternatives →
- 3
Tokenwise▲143A smart LLM proxy that shows where you're overpaying
Jun 2026 · tokenwisehq.com · its alternatives →
- 4
LLM Gatewayfree tier▲296I built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway that routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, llama-server, SGLang... anything that speaks /v1/chat/completions. Single Go binary, one YAML config file, no infrastructure. It does the things you'd expect from this kind of gateway... semantic routing via a three-layer cascade (keyword heuristics, embedding similarity, LLM classifier) that picks the best model when clients omit the model field, weighted round-robin load balancing across local inference servers with health checks and failover. The part I think is most…
2025 · llmgateway.io · its alternatives →
- 5
- 6
LLM Pricing▲178LLMs price comparison tool developed and updated by LLM
2024 · ailesson.io · its alternatives →
- 7
Calculate and compare the cost of the latest LLM APIs
2024 · docsbot.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
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 →
- 9AT
I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens/sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https://llmapitest.com/ Code: https://github.com/qjr87/llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…
2025 · llmapitest.com · its alternatives →
- 10
- 11
Hey HN, I’ve built Open Codex, a fully local, open-source alternative to OpenAI’s Codex CLI. My initial plan was to fork their project and extend it. I even started doing that. But it turned out their code has several leaky abstractions, which made it hard to override core behavior cleanly. Shortly after, OpenAI introduced breaking changes. Maintaining my customizations on top became increasingly difficult. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch using Python. My version is designed to support local LLMs. Right now, it only works with phi-4-mini (GGUF) via…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
- 13
Hi everyone, we’re a small team, supported by Mozilla, who are working on re-imagining a UI for training, tuning and testing local LLMs. Everything is open source. If you’ve been training your own LLMs or have always wanted to, we’d love for you to play with the tool and give feedback on what the future development experience for LLM engineering could look like.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Your AI agent is burning 6x more tokens than it needs to just to browse the web. We built OpenBrowser MCP to fix that. Most browser MCPs give the LLM dozens of tools: click, scroll, type, extract, navigate. Each call dumps the entire page accessibility tree into the context window. One Wikipedia page? 124K+ tokens. Every. Single. Call. OpenBrowser works differently. It exposes one tool. Your agent writes Python code, and OpenBrowser executes it in a persistent runtime with full browser access. The agent controls what comes back. No bloated page dumps. No wasted tokens. Just the data your…
Apr 2026 · openbrowser.me · its alternatives →
- 15
Current AI-assisted CLI tools are often part of larger systems and work better on Linux. I built llm-term to address these. It's a Rust-based tool that compiles into a single binary file. You only need to download the binary, add it to your PATH, and configure your OpenAI key to get started. While llm-term offers an option for gpt-4o, it works great with gpt-4o-mini. So it's not costly. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Pick a Mac mini, Mac Studio, DGX Spark or Strix Halo box, see which open models fit and how fast they run, and how much usage it takes to break even against paying an API. It is willing to say: it doesn
Sep 2026 · sunkcost.ai · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey HN! We've run our privacy-focused open-source inference company for a while now, and we're launching a flat monthly subscription similar to Anthropic's. It should work with Cline, Roo, KiloCode, Aider, etc — any OpenAI-compatible API client should do. The rate limits at every tier are higher than the Claude rate limits, so even if you prefer using Claude it can be a helpful backup for when you're rate limited, for a pretty low price. Let me know if you have any feedback!
2025 · synthetic.new · its alternatives →
- 18
Are you spending hundreds of dollars a month on AI coding costs? I built European Swallow AI, an API that uses reasoning models (Claude, Deepseek) for thinking and cheaper specialized coding models (Qwen, Grok) to write code, so you can save token costs while still getting high quality code. With an OpenAI formatted endpoint you can try European Swallow in Cursor, Typing Mind, Xibe AI and your own custom apps. During testing, European Swallow scored 80.5% on Big Code Bench and over 90% on the HumanEval+. It averaged $2.60 per million tokens compared with the $15 per million output tokens of…
2025 · europeanswallowai.com · its alternatives →
- 19IB
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 · its alternatives →
- 20
AI Cost Bar▲13Calculate LLM API call costs right from the menubar
2025 · aicostbar.com · its alternatives →
- 21
OptiLLM▲5Intelligent LLM Cost Optimization Platform
Mar 2026 · optillm.puniminds.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Afford AI▲11Track LLM usage, costs & tokens with real-time insights.
2025 · affordai.io · its alternatives →
- 23FT
Hey HN! When implementing an AI-powered feature for a project, we—and many people we've talked to—often reach a point where we have to choose an AI model but aren’t sure which one best fits our constraints or where to even start. Unfortunately, the advice to "just use chatgpt" is not always a good one. What if I want an open-source model? What languages does it support? What about context window size or the number of parameters? There are thousands of AI models already out there and many of them are perfect for certain problems. That’s why we’ve carved out this part of our product as a free…
2024 · app.elementera.ca · its alternatives →
- 24LR
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 · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →