API LEDGER · 2026-05-23 Edition I · consultance.ai

Two
Hundred
Zero.

Claude Max is $200 a seat. Cursor is another twenty. Then the OpenAI bill lands. Eleven providers now ship free tiers fat enough to run a small engineering team for nothing. Drop your numbers and watch the API line item evaporate.

↓ Calculate your $0 stack
01 //

Your spend

FTE
× $200
× $20
$/mo
$/mo
M tokens
6 / 11
$/h · hrs
02 //

Tape

Current annual AI dev spend $0
Free-stack annual cost (Claude API fallback, ~10% paid) $0
Setup investment (one-time) $0
Annual savings $0
Payback — days
Savings % 0%
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░

Senior engineer hires this would fund per year (at $180k loaded): 0.0

Savings % 0%
Monthly burn → now $0
Monthly burn → free stack $0

The free-stack number assumes ~10% of your coding tokens spill to the paid Claude API at $3/M input, $15/M output — a generous catch-all for the work the free tiers won't take.

Per-provider monthly allocation

Provider Free tier Rough cap / mo Best for
03 //

Provider routing

Route order is set in your ~/.config/llm-router/config.yaml — the bundle ships a working version.

04 //

The read

Calculating…

05 //

Source tape