Late at night, the faint glow of the monitor illuminates yet another headache-inducing bill.

As an indie developer, the scariest thing is seeing a cloud provider’s end-of-month payment reminder—AI inference runs fast, but your wallet shrinks even faster. GPUs are billed by the hour, and if your model is even slightly complex, costs skyrocket like a rocket launch.

The project in hand had real potential, but now it’s stuck because of compute bills. Traditional cloud pricing models just aren’t friendly to small teams. If I can’t find a more affordable solution, this thing I’ve worked on for over half a year might have to be shelved.

Compute costs are becoming the final straw that breaks the backs of many developers.