APIs sold without enthusiasm.
We run utility APIs you would otherwise wire up to seven different vendors with seven different billing cycles. RSS feeds, web fetching, social posting, the usual. Pay per call. No "contact sales."
Why so cheap?We don't have a sales team. We're not adding one. We run open-source models on rented hardware and pass the savings on. A spreadsheet exists that suggests these prices are not sustainable.
$ curl -fsSL cheapass.sh/install | sh $ cheapass keys create $ cheapass call rss/fetch --url https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Or skip the CLI:
curl https://api.cheapass.dev/v1/rss/fetch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/rss","since":"$CURSOR"}'Pay-per-call. $1/mo minimum if you use it that month. Volume discounts auto-apply over $50/mo. No tiers, no seats, no annual contracts. Text summarize: pass quality=premium for Kimi K2 ($0.005). Inputs over 8K tokens bill at the long rate automatically.
| rss/fetch | $0.0001 | / call |
| rss/discover | $0.0001 | / call |
| rss/from-site | $0.0010 | / call |
| rss/from-youtube | $0.0005 | / call |
| rss/from-reddit | $0.0005 | / call |
| rss/merge | $0.0010 | / call |
| rss/monitor | $0.0050 | / feed/day |
| web/markdown | $0.0005 | / call |
| web/metadata | $0.0002 | / call |
| web/browser | $0.0050 | / call |
| web/monitor | $0.0050 | / url/day |
| text/summarize | $0.0015 | / call |
| text/summarize.premium | $0.0050 | / call |
| text/summarize.long | $0.0030 | / call |
| text/entities | $0.0020 | / call |
| text/classify | $0.0005 | / call |
| text/sentiment | $0.0003 | / call |
| text/language | $0.0001 | / call |
| search/news | $0.0030 | / query |
| search/web | $0.0030 | / query |
| social/post | $0.0010 | / post |
| social/schedule | $0.0010 | / post |
rss/*
Fetch with delta cursors, auto-discover feeds from any URL, turn feedless sites into RSS, convert YouTube, Reddit, GitHub, and Substack into feeds, merge and dedupe across sources, webhook push on new items so you can stop polling.
web/*
URL → clean markdown for RAG and AI features. OG metadata and canonical URL resolution. Headless browser rendering for JS-heavy sites. URL change monitoring with webhook push.
text/*
Summarize articles, extract named entities, classify by topic, detect language and sentiment. Vercel AI Gateway with quality models — premium summarize uses Kimi K2. No image gen drama.
search/*
News across publishers by topic, web search, trending detection across your feed bundle.
social/*
Your users connect their own accounts via OAuth. Schedule, queue, and cross-post across X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, and friends. We do roughly what Buffer does, for less, because we haven't raised $46 million.
The design budget was spent on registering the domain.
Reliability is a spectrum. We aim for the part of it labeled "most of the time." Status page at status.cheapass.dev.
The same API works at scale. Volume discounts apply automatically over $50/month, which is more than our average customer spends in a quarter.
Yes. Reseller keys are in your dashboard. Mark our APIs up to whatever your customers will pay. This is, in fact, the business model we are using on top of someone else's infrastructure.
We do not log request bodies, because storing them would cost more than what we charge for them. We do not sell anything. We use Plausible for page analytics — no cookies, no third-party trackers, no PII.
No. We use AI in some endpoints. The word "native" is doing no work here.
Probably. The economics work as long as the user base remains a manageable size. If we suddenly succeed, we will be in trouble.