I Stopped Paying $141/Month for AI APIs. Here's My Setup Now.

I hit a breaking point last month when I tried to generate a 30-second video clip from a prompt. I already had a Replicate account, but the credits were drained. So I went to top up, forgot my password, reset it, re-entered my payment info because the card expired, and by the time I was ready to make the API call it had been 25 minutes. For one video clip. Then I looked at my subscriptions spreadsheet. (I keep one. I know.) OpenAI → $20/month Anthropic → $20/month ElevenLabs → $11/month Replicate → $50+/month AWS → $15/month SendGrid → $15/month Firecrawl → $10/month $141/month. Seven sets of billing credentials in my password manager. Three of them I used maybe twice last month. The ElevenLabs one especially annoyed me. I used TTS for one project demo in February. Eleven bucks for two audio files. I should've just recorded myself talking. The thing that actually made me switch It wasn't a blog post or a product launch. I was pairing with Claude Code on a side project — an AI-powered m