Build and Host AI-Powered Apps with Claude – No Deployment Needed

I used to love to make silly websites or apps with new technologies. Been doing it since flash. I have a pretty decent hit rate! It’s not unusually to get half a million or so people try one of them.

But with AI that model is just totally broken because the running cost is so high.

If I have half a million people come play my silly AI game that I have no wish to monetise - I am gonna be POOR very fast.

Log in with [insert ai vendor here] is something I’ve been hoping would happen for a while.

Agreed, it's an interesting model. I wonder what the approval ui looks like for the app end-user? Is it super clear to them that they're financially responsible for their usage?

Yeah I wonder how that actually works - because I would guess people are logging in with their consumer login not an api login, so they’re not really even in the mindset of limits and cost per token.

"Log in With Google" to use Drive storage has long been a thing. Maybe proxying Gemini usage isn't too far off.

Precisely. You click on a claude link, and suddenly it's, "You are now financially responsible for your actions from here on..." I'm sure they've spent a lot of time thinking through the ui/ux of this.

This is seriously lacking but I think things like jailbreaks and malicious prompts make it a bit too brittle for now

The thing is though, it doesn’t need to have access to your personal info in the context, so it cant leak anything. And they are obviously used to people talking all sorts of jailbreak shit to their chatbot - so it isn’t really much worse than that.

Also I reckon the cost of running a text chatbot is basically peanuts now (that is, for a giant tech company with piles of hard cash to burn to keep the server farm warm)

"Bring your own AI" or "Provide your AI API access key" will probably be coming to a lot of services/apps that we want 'our' AI's to interact with.

I can see this also bringing strongly tiered AI's, there will be commodity/free AI's a and expensive ones for rich people/power users.

Users of Claude-hosted apps can't thereby incur financial liability, because it counts against the usage limit of their consumer Claude plan, which either is free or has a fixed monthly subscription price. The worst that can happen is that they run out of quota and can't use Claude anymore until it resets, which happens every day on free plans and every five hours on paid ones. In no case is usage attributed to an API key with metered pricing.

I just hope I live to see the day personal agents are empowered to make ad hoc use of paid services on our behalf—via eg AITP (Agent Interaction & Transaction Protocol), which is specifically designed to enable autonomous, secure communication, negotiation, and value exchange between agents across trust boundaries. AITP includes explicit capabilities for "Payments" (AITP-01) and "Data Request" (AITP-03), allowing structured sharing of sensitive information like addresses and passwords that can be programmatically verified and executed.

Similarly, the Coral Protocol aims to be an open and decentralized infrastructure for "The Internet of Agents," with "built-in economic transactions" at its core. This means agents can be compensated for their contributions via on-chain micropayments

Oh, damn, no, that sounds like an expense-tracking nightmare. Budgeting becomes the principal executive input.

Ah true. So the push becomes even stronger for people to upgrade to the max plans, when several of the "apps" they're using are consuming their allocated Claude tokens. Brilliant.

Snowflake does revenue sharing, it’s possible that AI providers can start doing that too.

> "Provide your AI API access key" will probably be coming to a lot of services/apps that we want 'our' AI's to interact with.

Considering provide your own API key is banned by a number of larger players (Reddit, Google Maps) to stop large numbers of users cashing in on the free/cheap low usage tiers I'd expect AI vendors would enforce the same rules soon once all this free VC hype funding dries up.

Last line of your comment is what I was thinking the entire time. Another layer of abstraction between our minds and our wallets.

>> If I have half a million people come play my silly AI game that I have no wish to monetise - I am gonna be POOR very fast.

But the article says:

  When someone uses your Claude-powered app:

  They authenticate with their existing Claude account
  Their API usage counts against their subscription, not yours
  You pay nothing for their usage
  No one needs to manage API keys

So how would that impact you?

Yep. Meanwhile I’m trying to figure out how can I make something that people would want to pay for, and how can I charge them, if they’re going to interact directly with Claude and burn their own quota.

That's still no good. The only real way it could work is by having models running locally with WASM.

anthro needs to let the creator charge % on top of their usage quota or give points/money to the creator to fix up the incentives here

That's a really good idea! That would handle micropayments that nobody would even bother with (to pay, to process, to receive, ...).

Could even have users select the payment %age or have it set by the contract tier between the app creator and the user (10% for simple user, 20% for pro access with other features, 40% enterprise,...).

JFC, these crypto people never stop! No matter how many times their tech has shown itself it be just about useless other than for illegal activities or for scamming people, they keep pushing it in every new tech space that exists.

I swear 100 years from now someone will be inventing faster then light travel, and there will be some tech scammers posting on HN on "how much better it would be on chain". Or how "the engine could be better if it used a decentralized crypto protocol."

The allure of being in the ground floor of a new scam just must be that great.

On-device models seems like a good approach to this. Especially if it's silly projects they probably don't need the latest and greatest expensive models.

Firebase recently launch some experimental on-device APIs. https://firebase.blog/posts/2025/06/hybrid-inference-firebas...

any details on this? how they can even detect it or ban it?

do you have a link where I can read more about it?

That’s exactly my point, like now it wouldn’t, previously it would.

Yes I agree strongly, if I could just make a small percentage for my mildly interesting LLM wrapper it would be perfect! @anthropic please implement this

It's in their TOS. Trivial to ban you when they see thousands of different keys coming from a single IP.

That's what I've been preaching, too. The provider that does it, will win the game.

not sure what CORS rule they have but in edge apps most likely your users will run AI API directly from their devices so not like their key will be used more than on few edge devices they have.