Wattfare – User-Funded LLM API Proxy

Developers building AI products face unpredictable API bills that scale with user traffic. Wattfare lets users bring their own API keys (like BYOK), splitting costs between builder and users without breaking the bank. Target: indie developers and small teams building AI-powered apps.

The BYOK pattern is gaining real traction as LLM costs become the dominant expense line for small AI products, and OpenAI's own usage policies now explicitly accommodate key-sharing architectures, which removes a previous legal ambiguity. No clear incumbent owns this specific proxy-plus-cost-splitting niche, though Portkey and LiteLLM handle adjacent routing problems without the user-funding angle. The $2k–10k/mo band is plausible but requires volume: margin comes from a thin layer of infrastructure, so the math only works if dozens of active developer customers each have meaningful user bases, which means growth depends entirely on developer adoption velocity. The biggest risk is that most end users refuse to paste an API key into a third-party app, making the UX ask too high and collapsing the whole cost-splitting premise before it scales.