AWS reminded me why I built $2/month flat-rate AI This week, a story hit Hacker News: "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left." It has 500+ points and 400+ comments. Developers are nodding along. The story isn't really about AWS. It's about billing that punishes you for using a tool correctly. The AWS billing problem is the same as the ChatGPT billing problem With AWS, you provision something, forget a setting, and wake up to a $400 surprise. With ChatGPT API, you call it in a loop, forget a rate limit, and wake up to a $200 charge you didn't expect. Both tools are powerful. Both have pricing models that require you to understand your usage perfectly before you use them. That's a tax on experimentation. If you're scared to run your code because you don't know what it will cost, that's a broken product. What I built instead I built SimplyLouie — a flat-rate Claude API wrapper. $2/month. No usage meters. No surprise bills. No ceiling on experimentation.…