About Frugal

Frugal is an AI API cost management platform that connects to your AI provider accounts — OpenAI, Anthropic, Replicate, fal.ai — and gives you a unified real-time view of every dollar you're spending on inference.

It polls provider usage APIs every five minutes, writes records to a normalized usage store, and evaluates your budget rules on every cycle. When a threshold is crossed, it fires alerts via email and Slack before your billing period closes.

The modern AI development stack is powerful but financially opaque. OpenAI, Anthropic, Replicate, and fal.ai were built to let you build — not to help you track what that building costs. Their billing dashboards show you last month's invoice. They don't tell you when you're about to blow your budget this month.

What's missing from every AI provider

• No native cross-provider spend aggregation
• No proactive budget threshold alerts
• No per-project or per-team cost attribution
• No anomaly detection for unexpected usage spikes
• No way to enforce a hard spending limit before damage is done

By the time you see an invoice, the month is over. Frugal gives you the information you need when it's still actionable.

Connect your AI provider accounts with read-only API credentials. Frugal validates each connection, begins polling usage data every five minutes via a QStash-triggered worker, and surfaces that data in a unified dashboard.

Three steps to cost control

• Connect — paste your provider API keys. Frugal encrypts them with AES-256 before they touch the database.
• Configure — set monthly limits per provider. Alert at 80%, 90%, 100% — or any threshold you choose. Per-project and per-team support.
• Relax — Frugal polls every 5 minutes and fires Slack and email alerts the moment you cross a threshold.

Frugal handles API credentials on behalf of its users. We take that responsibility seriously.

• All API keys encrypted with AES-256 before storage — never appear in plaintext
• Keys never logged, never exposed in API responses, never client-accessible
• Read-only permission model — we query usage data, we don't make inference requests
• Row-level security enforced on all database tables via Supabase RLS
• TLS/HTTPS for all data in transit

Frugal is built for developers, product teams, and AI startups who have moved past prototyping and are running AI workloads in production.

You'll get the most from Frugal if you

• Build production applications powered by OpenAI, Anthropic, Replicate, or fal.ai
• Manage multiple AI providers and want unified visibility
• Need to report AI infrastructure costs to a finance team or investor
• Have received a surprise AI invoice at least once
• Run multiple projects with separate budget accountability

Frugal is a product of Gray Matter Labs, Inc. — a small, focused software studio building infrastructure tools for the modern development stack. We believe AI-powered products should be financially sustainable, not just technically impressive.