SaaS founders: how much do you spend on Claude tokens for in-app assistants, and would you offload to users' plans?

PsychologicalItem505 · reddit · 2026-09-15

A founder doing market validation on Reddit is polling SaaS builders on their monthly Claude API spend for user-facing AI assistants (<$50, $200–500, or $1k+), and how much burns during local debugging before ever reaching users.

They also pitch an idea: middleware that routes in-app assistant usage through users' existing $20/mo Claude Pro plans instead of draining developer API balances or forcing non-technical users to create API keys. Would builders integrate it — and what would the biggest hesitation be (security/auth friction, latency, terms-of-service risk)?

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