WHO
Indie developers and 1–20 person SaaS/platform engineering teams who already wire LLM/agents into products, CI, or internal tools.
HardCap · Waitlist
Stop runaway LLM bills before the call
Hard budgets per project. Velocity breakers. One-click kill across OpenAI, Anthropic & Gemini — not another after-the-fact alert.
Market-validation page · Free waitlist · No fake user counts
Problem
The bill arrives too late
Provider budget alerts and cost rollups often lag by hours. By the time you see the warning, a runaway agent, retry loop, or leaked key may already have burned thousands to tens of thousands of euros — and each vendor has its own caps.
Before
- Alerts lag hours; damage already done
- Each provider, separate rules
- Hunting consoles during a runaway
After
- Pre-call hard budget rejects over-cap requests
- Unified virtual keys + project caps
- Velocity trip + one-click hard stop
Solution
What HardCap does
HardCap is a pre-call hard stop for teams already shipping LLM/agents — not another post-hoc cost dashboard.
PROBLEM
Provider alerts are mostly after the fact; runaway spend and fragmented cross-provider caps leave no unified hard stop.
SOLUTION
~5-minute gateway/SDK: virtual API keys, per-project day/hour hard budgets, spend-velocity breakers, Slack + one-click kill — chat/completions first.
RESULT
Block over-budget and runaway calls before they hit the provider — not explain the invoice at month end.
Features
Features
Marketing points derived from the product hypothesis — for demand validation, not a formal spec promise.
Virtual API keys
Route chat/completions through project-scoped virtual keys. Isolate budgets and kill switches — lower leak and cross-project overspend risk.
Per-project day/hour hard budgets
Check and reserve budget before the call. Over the hard cap = rejected — not a late email.
Spend-velocity breaker
Detect abnormal short-window burn (retry loops / runaway agents) and auto-trip the circuit.
Slack alert + one-click hard stop
Actionable alerts: one-click hard-stop a project or key and shrink the “found it, still burning” window.
Cross-provider OOTB
Unified hard-control experience across major chat/completions providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and more).
How it works
How it works
Three steps matching the waitlist-stage product hypothesis.
- 1
Drop in a virtual API key
Point chat/completions at the HardCap gateway/SDK (~5 minutes).
- 2
Set day/hour hard budgets
Per-project hard caps checked before the call; over budget = blocked.
- 3
Auto-trip + one-click kill
Abnormal spend velocity trips; Slack alert then one-click hard stop.
Use cases
Who it’s for
If these situations sound familiar, join the waitlist to help us validate.
Indie + agent products
Afraid of overnight runaway? Set day/hour hard caps and sleep.
Small SaaS platform eng
Multi-env/multi-project sharing a vendor account — isolate with virtual keys + project budgets.
CI / internal tools
When retries and scripts go wild, the velocity breaker trips first; then one-click kill.
Key-leak stop-the-bleed
Abnormal velocity + one-click hard stop shrinks the window where the alert arrived but spend kept burning.
Cross-provider cost discipline
One hard-ruleset — no more configuring delayed alerts in every console.
Public signals
Public signals from the community
Public reporting and threads only — not customer testimonials or invented metrics.
- Hacker NewsFirebase / Gemini ~13 hours, €54k+; ~€28k already spent while alerts lagged.
- Reddit r/LLMTraffic unchanged but spend doubled — teams hunting tools for sudden LLM cost spikes.
- Reddit r/LLMDevs$8k→$24k/mo with missing cross-provider member allocation at team scale.
- udit.coAI SaaS gross margins often ~50–65% vs traditional 75–85% — cost pressure is real.
- ivaayaUnit economics of an AI product — why variable LLM spend hits margin hard.
FAQ
FAQ
How is HardCap different from provider budget alerts?
Provider alerts are mostly after the fact. HardCap checks hard budgets before the call and can block spend in real time.
How do you differ from LiteLLM / OpenRouter / Helicone / Portkey?
We focus on OOTB pre-call hard budgets, spend-velocity breakers, and one-click kill—not a full observability suite replacement.
Do I need to switch model providers?
No. Sit HardCap in front of your existing chat/completions path.
When is early access?
Waitlist invites go out in batches by email. We won’t invent a fake launch date.
Will you see my prompts?
Waitlist stage: we’ll publish data-handling details with the product. No unverified architecture claims on this page.
Waitlist
Join the waitlist
Leave your email for HardCap early access and launch notes. We will not invent a ship date.
Thank you — you’re on the HardCap waitlist.
We’ll email early-access invites and launch updates in batches. Unsubscribe anytime.