LLM-BillSplit Gateway

Who it's for

Indie/early-stage AI teams (1–10 devs) who today cope by sharing provider keys, scraping provider dashboards, or manually exporting CSVs and reconciling usage in spreadsheets.

The problem

Time and payment pain: manual reconciliation of multi-provider LLM usage takes hours/week, causes billing disputes, unpaid internal chargebacks, and unexpected overages; also legal/operational pain from shared keys and lack of per-developer audit trail.

How to build it

Hosted SaaS proxy endpoint + tiny web dashboard; optional per-repo GitHub Action that injects proxied endpoint env and per-developer metadata; integrates with Stripe (Connect) for invoicing and with 2+ LLM provider APIs (OpenAI, OpenRouter-compatible endpoints) for realtime cost mapping.

How it makes money

Who pays: the team/org. Price: $20–100/month per team for hosted proxy + dashboard, or 1–2% of billed pass-through usage via Stripe Connect (opt-in) for teams that want automatic invoicing; they pay because it saves hours of bookkeeping, prevents monthly overages, and provides auditable per-developer chargebacks that spreadsheets can't reliably deliver.

Why it doesn't exist yet

Incumbent API gateways aim at large customers and require complex contracts; providers only show org-level dashboards and don't map calls to individual devs or repos. An indie can fill this because small teams need a minimal, opinionated routing+recon tool that prioritizes quick setup, Stripe invoicing, and per-developer CSVs rather than full enterprise features.

First users

First 10 users come from: (1) makers of small LLM-based apps on Product Hunt / Hacker News, (2) remote-first AI consultancies tired of spreadsheet billing, (3) open-source model-hosting projects who want a paid endpoint, (4) early adopters from OpenRouter+Stripe signal, and (5) communities on r/SideProject and Discord AI stacks seeking affordable cost-splitting.

Build size

2 people x 8 weeks: includes a small Go/Rust proxy (rate-limited, logs usage with metadata), a React dashboard (usage table, CSV export, reconciliation view), Stripe Connect integration for billing, 2 provider connectors (OpenAI + OpenRouter/compatible), and a GitHub Action; excludes multi-region infra, SSO/SCIM, and enterprise SAML.

Biggest risk

A major LLM provider ships native per-user usage attribution + Stripe-integrated invoicing for free, or OpenRouter/other infra standardizes a built-in per-developer billing layer that removes the need for an indie proxy.

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• Proxied call logs: for any team using the proxy, produce a call-level CSV (timestamp, developer-id, repo-id, model, input-tokens, output-tokens, provider-cost) that can be downloaded within 24h.
• Stripe-reconciliation report: one-page PDF + CSV that matches provider invoices to team chargebacks for the last billing period (sums per-developer costs, shows mismatches >1%), generated on-demand and exportable to Stripe Connect payout schedule.
• Routing rules + caps: a simple UI to set per-developer daily/monthly hard caps and provider-preference fallback (e.g., prefer CheaperProvider then OpenAI), with enforcement that returns a 402 or configured fallback within 1s of a capped request.

How it's judged (in 6 months)

Product Hunt daily top 5 or GitHub 1,000 stars for the repo implementing the gateway (either threshold qualifies)(judgment date 2027-02-20)

AI self-confidence 55/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate