Frugon
Find which LLM calls a cheaper model could handle (local, MIT)
Details
- External ID
- 48816724
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Frugon
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- July 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 67
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8763440860215054
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I started leaning in on AI heavily this year, as I wanted to get more done autonomously, but then my token usage climbed dramatically to the point where my weekly quota would run out before the end of the week, sometimes a couple of days into the week.I realised I had to do something about it else I'd have to double my spend. So I decided to start tracking my cost per task type. This revealed that a lot of my spend went to searches/scans or simple things like scouting tasks.I then decided to turn this into a simple CLI tool that can be used to read your OpenAI-style logs locally, and analyze the cost and compare this spend to other models, then show you how much you could potentially save by switching those calls to a cheaper model.When you run analyze you get an offline estimate priced against LiteLLM and gated by LMArena tiers. The general savings bands come from the research published by RouteLLM; but you can confirm this yourself using 2 commands --measure (shows the prompt-response output side by side) and --judge (a model chosen to do the comparisons). These send a sample of the prompts from the logs to the candidate models - either the default choice or set by you. This call goes directly to the model provider (never through me) as any normal LLM call would, and the response is shown and judged to either be better or worse or a tie.It's deliberately small, because I tend to over complicate/think things sometimes: analyze + capture + a few commands, doing three jobs. Cost, quality visibility, routing recommendation.Nothing is hosted. capture is an optional local proxy on your own machine, and there's no endpoint in the path of your data. You can confirm this by checking the source.I included a demo so you can check out the output. It has a synthetic 56k call log (a month's worth) showing how costs can drop from $549.46 to $343.91 a month. A 37.4% saving.Try it: uvx frugon analyze --demo or uv tool install frugon Then point it at your own logs.All feedback is welcome, especially any on the routing/quality logic, or anything else, good or bad.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- find cheaper llm models for ai calls
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Analyzing token usage and benchmarking prompt responses against smaller LLMs to suggest model downgrade opportunities is a standard script or local proxy dashboard.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: GoModel - AI Gateway, RouteLLM, OpenRouter's auto mode, Wayfinder Router
Concerns raised: Human review steps not visible in logs, hard to quantify retry costs, Accuracy sensitive to nonce and temperature without hyperparameter variance, Only supports OpenAI-style jsonl format currently, Self-bias risk when judge model auto-selected from highest-tier
Feature requests: Response time as dimension for judging local model performance, Support for OpenInference/OpenTelemetry schema for agent sessions, Improved UX for local and unpriced models, Effective cost per judged success metric combining dollar cost with judge outcomes
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 188 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #30 of 189 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 248 days after the earliest competitor.
- Throttle · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Bloomberg Terminal for LLM ops · hn · 2026-04-13 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Frugal Tokens · hn · 2026-08-19 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- An unmetered LLM API–$6/month, no token tracking, no limits · hn · 2026-07-06 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Sunk Cost · hn · 2026-09-15 · 46 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Culpa · ph · 2026-09-10 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier · hn · 2026-03-08 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- cheapest-llm-api-fr · github · 2026-09-28 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.