Indie SaaS

The API bill that stopped growing.

The AI line item was the fastest-growing cost in the business and the hardest to forecast, because it scaled with usage rather than with a plan. Moving the agent work onto a subscription made it a fixed number again.

flatmonthly AI cost
$0in metered API credits
forecastablenot usage-coupled

A line item you can't forecast

Metered AI spend behaves like infrastructure without the predictability: it grows with every run, spikes when the team gets ambitious, and can't be budgeted a quarter ahead. For a small SaaS, an unforecastable cost is worse than a large one — it makes every other number softer.

before · usage-coupled, spiky, unforecastable
after · flat plan + hosting, budgetable

Flat, because the plan was already flat

The same work now runs under the subscription the team was already paying for, and Cortev bills for the cloud and the orchestration — not for tokens. Two predictable numbers replaced one unpredictable one, and neither of them moves when the team decides to be ambitious for a week.

And the quiet bleed, too

The other half of the bill is the infrastructure nobody remembers owning: the idle box, the abandoned project still provisioned, the resource with no owner. Cortev maps what you actually run so the dead weight gets found and killed before the next invoice, rather than after.

Other case studies

Make your AI cost a flat number again.

Connect the account you already have, point Cortev at your repos, and let it run while you're somewhere else.

An illustrative scenario of how Cortev is used — a composite, not a named customer, and the figures above are examples rather than audited results. Your own savings depend on your usage and your plan's fair-use limits.