Show HN: I built an LLM chat app because we shouldn't need 10 AI subscriptions
50 comments
·July 13, 2025al_borland
I like the idea of a single chat with many models. Pre-AI-everything, I was already a Kagi user, so already paying for that. I've started using the Kagi Assistant[0] to solve this for myself. I pay $10/month, as I always did, and that's my credit limit to the various LLMs. They added an AI cost tracker to create transparency to those costs. So far this month I've used $0.88 of my $10.00 allotment. So I don't feel like I'm in any danger of going over. If I wasn't already paying for this, I'd be pretty interested in an option that was pay-as-you-go.
Looking at your pricing I find the credit model a bit confusing. It feels like credit card points and I don't really have a concept of what that will get me. Tokens are a bit abstract, but that's the currency of AI, so it is what it is. Adding credits as an intermediary between tokens and dollars may have been done with the goal of simplify things, but it my head it makes it harder to understand and leaves more places for hidden fees to hide.
Giving some idea of how much usage someone could expect to get out of a 1,000 tokens or 100 credits or $1 would be useful. I can do the math and see I can do 20 web searches for $1, but does that include follow up questions? Is every question a web search? Kagi shows that I've used 15 searches so far today, and it's cost me less than 2¢ for the almost 19k tokens. So I'm a bit confused.
More generally on the chat-only umbrella tools, I do miss some of the nice-to-have options of going directly with the big players (interactive code editors, better images generation, etc), but not enough to be paying $20+/month/service.
metrix
I've been using openrouter.ai to use "all llm's". No subscription, and can be tied to your editor of choice
pyman
For free? How's that possible when one AI prompt uses 10x more energy than a Google search [1]?
[1] Source: https://kanoppi.co/search-engines-vs-ai-energy-consumption-c...
symboltoproc
10 google searches are also free
mritchie712
> Couldn't find one, so I built one.
there are no less than 100 of these.
exe34
They couldn't find one of their own. All those 100 others were built by others!
fredwu
> Couldn't find one, so I built one.
> What do you think?
You were lost between all the AI stuff... but have you not tried to simply use Google to find a bunch of similar services?
kwamenum86
Librechat seems perfect for your use case. It’s open source as well. Used by many of the big techcos to solve the problem you’re describing, so it’s battle tested https://www.librechat.ai
v5v3
Only has some models but https://Duck.Ai is free
It's Duckduckgo's offering.
woodylondon
Good idea, and I also explored this idea and a year ago and also started building one, recognising a gap in the market for a solution that supports multiple LLMs, but also provides small businesses with a centralised managed AI client - billing, monitoring, logging, company prompts, etc.
Ultimately, I discovered https://www.typingmind.com, which offers all of these features. I am sure there are others - I was amazed that not more of these came out. Might be worth to see what they have built. The more of these that come out the better - its a whole new market.
Alifatisk
Isn't this what openrouter is for?
bob_theslob646
What's openrouter?
v5v3
edited to remove statement saying API only, as per comments.
metrix
They have a chat feature allowing you to talk with multiple models
boomskats
Not sure if you noticed, but the first CTA on the link you posted is a prompt to "Start a message", which then opens a multi-model capable chat interface.
kosolam
Openrouter has a chat built in as well. Also, since librechat was mentioned, the self hosted option I currently prefer is openwebui - connected to openrouter and gemini here.
delduca
There is an open source alternative
aae42
anyone could run this themselves with open web UI and litellm, in fact that's the stack I've been using
vinhnx
I also built VT (https://vtchat.io.vn), a secure, privacy-first AI chat platform focused on data sovereignty. It supports BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) models, OpenRouter integration, and local models through LM Studio and Ollama (currently in beta).
yellow_lead
There's also https://t3.chat/
covercash
Tangentially related, but is there any sort of chat bot that will look at the query and suggest which LLM might be the best for that particular task?
boomskats
Have a look at OpenRouter's Auto Router[0].
intellectronica
Cool and hats off to you for building an app ... but how come you couldn't find one?! There are so many. I use Raycast, which has access to all the models, there's Poe (from Quora) which is popular, Perplexity offers access to many models, and there are many more...
lemming
I'll bite: what is the web search story like? This is the killer feature of e.g. chatgpt that none of the alternative or OSS options offer. Having the search be fast (i.e. not round tripping to the client on every search) and integrated into the thinking process is unbeatable, I use it constantly. The big API providers all provide search options in their APIs now, but they're very quirky - openai doesn't allow search via their API with thinking models. Gemini doesn't allow you to use search with any other tools available. Claude's just doesn't seem to work that well, even in their own web UI. I even paid for typing mind, which is nice, but I never use it and always just end up paying for chatgpt again because of this.
I'm lost between ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini... which subscriptions to take? With Cursor and all these specific AI tools, I just wanted one simple chat app where I can use any model and pay only when I use it.
Couldn't find one, so I built one.
Pay only for what you use. Your prompts and docs, knowledge bases work with every model - no more copy-pasting between apps.
Started as a personal project, but thought someone else might benefit from this too.
https://prismharmony.com/chat
What do you think?