I spent 7 days building a product from scratch and shipped it live this week.
Not a tutorial project. Not a clone. A real tool that solves a real problem — and it's already live.
The problem: Most startups and dev teams are overpaying for AI tools and have no idea. The bills auto-renew, nobody audits them, and the waste is surprisingly specific. Teams paying for Cursor Business with 2 engineers. People subscribed to both Claude and ChatGPT, using one 90% of the time. Two code assistants running simultaneously.
What I built: SpendLens — a free AI spend auditor. You enter your tools, plans, and seats. It tells you exactly which plans are wrong for your team size, where you're double-paying, and your total potential savings.
What I learned building it:
The hardest part wasn't the code. It was deciding what NOT to build. The audit engine is entirely hardcoded rules — no AI — because financial reasoning needs to be auditable. Knowing when not to reach for AI is a skill.
The second hardest part was the user interviews. I talked to 3 real engineering managers before finishing the product. One of them didn't know his team was running two code assistants simultaneously. That conversation changed what I built.
Shipped on Next.js 14, TypeScript, Supabase, Groq API, Resend, Vercel. Full test suite. CI/CD. Proper documentation.
The user developed a tool called SpendLens to audit AI tool expenditures for startups and development teams. The tool identifies unnecessary spending and suggests potential savings. It's built using Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, and other technologies. The user emphasizes the importance of manual verification and invites feedback for improvements.
Pricing data is manually verified from official vendor pages every week. If anything is wrong, open an issue - I'll fix it within 24 hours.
Try it (free, no login): https://spend-lens-pi.vercel.app
GitHub: https://github.com/naitik2004/SpendLens
Where are you getting these stats that "most startups and dev teams are overpaying for AI tools and have no idea"?
Every startup and Dev team I know of is fully aware of what tools they are using and the costs associated with it.