u/Any_Spell_5716

I've been building and launching Nasca (nasca.dev) over the past few weeks. It's a monetisation SDK for AI apps, and the experience has taught me something I didn't expect.

I assumed marketing to developers would be easier. We all hang out in the same communities, we speak the same language, we share what we're building. Surely finding potential users would be straightforward?

The opposite turned out to be true. Developers are actually one of the hardest audiences to market to. A few reasons I've noticed:

We can build alternatives ourselves. When a developer sees a tool that solves a problem, the first instinct is often "I could build that" not "I should buy that." The build vs buy calculation is different for us than for non-technical users.

We're sceptical of new dependencies. Asking a developer to wrap their core AI function in a third party SDK from an unknown solo founder is a significant trust ask. What happens if it breaks? What if the founder disappears? These are real concerns that a non-technical user would never think about.

The timing has to be exactly right. Developers don't go looking for monetisation tooling until they actively need it. Unlike consumer products where you can create desire, developer tools have to be there at the exact moment someone is solving a specific problem.

We gather in communities but we're not there to buy. Reddit, Discord, HN are all places where we're there to learn, share, and discuss. A product post feels out of place in a way it wouldn't on Instagram or TikTok.

I think there's a very real increase in barrier to adoption in communities where everyone is building stuff themselves when compared to consumer markets (e.g. fitness or health apps). Obviously it's not easy building and distributing in any space, but I've definitely felt a difference on this project when compared to others in non dev spaces.

Curious if other founders building developer tools have found the same thing, and what actually worked for getting that first wave of users?

If you're building an AI app and and are still figuring out how to handle pricing, credits, usage limits, or looking to optimise these features, I’m looking to work directly with a few founders.

I've spent the last few months building the monetisation layer I kept having to rebuild. It handles per-user limits, credit top-ups, subscription plans, upgrade prompts, Stripe Connect. It's called Nasca and I’ve worked to make the integration as fast and easy as possible (10 lines of code).

But more importantly, I want to work closely with a small number of founders to make sure it actually solves the real problem, and not just technically, but commercially. Which limits make sense for your users? How should credits be priced to maximise conversion? What does the upgrade prompt need to say to get people to actually pay? My app tracks all of this and provides analytics, all you do is integrate!

These are questions I want to figure out together with real products, not in isolation.

What you get:

• Free Pro access permanently
• I'll personally help with integration
• Direct input on what gets built next
• Someone who actually cares whether your AI features are profitable

What I'm looking for:

• Building something with AI APIs and real or soon-to-have users
• Haven't fully sorted monetisation yet
• Willing to give honest feedback

Keeping this to 3-5 so I can work closely with each. Comment with what you're building or DM me.

nasca.dev

Been building a few things on OpenAI and Anthropic and kept running into the same problem. There's no built in way to cap how much any individual user can cost you. The org level spend limits protect OpenAI from you, not you from your own users.

I never got burned badly because my projects stayed small, but I kept thinking about what happens when one power user runs an agent in a loop overnight on a bigger product. Your whole monthly budget gone before you wake up.

I ended up solving it properly for myself by building an SDK. Redis counters per user per month, a Cloudflare Worker intercepting every API call before it hits the provider, fire and forget logging after. Adds under 20ms so nobody notices. Dashboard shows spend per user so you can see who your heavy hitters are before they become a problem.

Hi all,

For anyone building AI powered apps with end users who don’t want to solve rate limiting, upgrade prompting, and analytics on api usage in a low latency way natively.

Nasca is an SDK that solves this with minimal integration. You define monthly spend limits per user tier in dollars (no napkin math with tokens), wrap your AI function once, and Nasca handles the tracking, limiting, and upgrade prompting automatically. It runs on Cloudflare workers and Redis so the interception adds under 20ms. It’s free up to 250 and users tracked so other indie devs can track without paying until they’re earning.

nasca.dev

Building a couple of AI-powered tools taught me a very painful lesson about per-user cost tracking.
The first time I got a surprise bill I assumed I'd just misconfigured something. The second time I realised there was no clean solution. OpenAI and Anthropic have no native way to limit costs per end-user. You're building that logic yourself every single time, and it can be tricky to implement correctly until it’s too late.

I first tried implementing the middleware myself using my existing stack (Vercel and Supabase) but the latency times completely destroyed the usability of my app.

What I ended up with after doing it badly twice:
Redis counters per user per month
A Cloudflare worker intercepting every AI API call before it hits the provider
Post-call logging that’s fire and forget so it doesn’t slow anything down
A dashboard showing which users are burning through budget

It took weeks and it's not the kind of thing you want to rebuild for every project.
So I extracted it into a standalone tool, Nasca. One wrap function around your AI call, define your monthly budgets per tier in dollars, done. If you're building something with AI APIs and have end users, it might save you the same headache. I purposely made an indie dev friendly free tier for people who might be in the same position I was.

Happy to share more about the implementation if anyone’s interested. And if you've solved this differently I'd genuinely love to hear how.
Nasca