About
AI apps shouldn't go broke on token bills.
ProtAI is credit metering for AI apps. We give every one of your users their own balance — on tokens, generations, minutes, whatever you bill for — and the guardrails to make sure nobody burns through your margin. We're a small, independent team building the infrastructure we wished existed when we shipped our first AI wrapper.
The problem
AI wrappers were taking off, and every founder we knew had the same story: a free tier, a prompt loop, a shared API key — and a token bill 40× what they expected. The providers give you a dashboard. Nobody gives you per-user control.
The insight
Prepaid mobile figured this out decades ago: give every user a balance, warn them before it runs out, cut them off cleanly. AI apps needed the same primitive — a tiny API that answers one question: is this spend allowed?
ProtAI
So we built it: check() before you spend, report() after. Per-user balances, monthly quotas, spend alerts, credit packs via Stripe, and a kill-switch for the bad days. Three lines of code, no proxy, works with any provider.
Principles
What we believe
No proxy, ever
ProtAI never sits in front of your model traffic. Your prompts, completions, and user data flow directly to your provider — we only meter what you tell us you spent. Less latency, fewer failure points, nothing to leak.
Guardrails before invoices
A surprise $4,000 token bill is a product failure, not a pricing strategy. Quotas, alerts, and the kill-switch exist so you hear about spend problems before your accountant does.
Built for indie budgets
We started ProtAI because enterprise cost-management tools cost more than the problem they solve. Flat pricing, a genuinely useful free tier, no per-call fees — the math should always favor the builder.
Boring infrastructure
Metering is the kind of thing that must simply never break. Atomic balance deductions, an immutable ledger, idempotent APIs. We'd rather be invisible than impressive.
3 lines
to integrate — check() before, report() after
$0
to start — the free tier is genuinely useful
0
proxies — your traffic never touches our servers
Want to talk? We read everything.