Early bets, with receipts.
Five ideas I started before Anthropic, Datadog, Google, Atlassian, Apple and edelkrone shipped their own versions. A sixth that nobody has followed yet.
AI Cost Guardian
13 days before Anthropic shipped its cost API. Nine months before Datadog.
One place to see, govern and cut what a company spends on AI models.
What it does
It connects a company’s OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Grok accounts, keeps the API keys encrypted, and shows spend by provider, model, person and team. Budgets, alerts, roles and audit logs sit on top. A built-in chat workbench sends each prompt to the cheapest model that can handle it.
Why I built it
Companies were adding AI providers faster than anyone could read the bill. Nobody had one view of what was spent, where it was wasted, or who was accountable for it. I built that view.
AI Cost Management
Reimagined for Enterprise
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Gemini
- Grok
Who came after
- +13 daysAnthropicopened a Usage & Cost API for organisation-wide spend reports.18 Aug 2025
- +15 daysClaude Code for Teamsadded per-organisation and per-user spend limits.20 Aug 2025
- +36 daysVantageput Claude costs next to cloud spend in its FinOps product.10 Sep 2025
- +9 moDatadoglaunched AI cost tracking across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Bedrock, by user, key and model.14 May 2026
- +11 moClaude Enterpriseadded cost by group and user, spend alerts and model entitlements for admins.2 Jul 2026
Already there before me. Helicone and Langfuse (2023) tracked LLM cost for developers, OpenAI had a usage and cost API (December 2024), and OpenRouter routed prompts automatically (January 2025). What came after, from Anthropic, Vantage and Datadog, was spend control for admins and finance teams.
NoMail
Almost five months before Google announced an AI Inbox for Gmail that surfaces bills due and deliveries.
An email client that reads Gmail and hands back what you have to do: what is arriving, what is due, what renews.
What it does
It reads Gmail without changing it and pulls out deliveries, bills, subscriptions with their yearly cost, renewals and invites. Each one comes with the action it needs: track, pay, manage or join. When an email doesn’t match a shape it knows, AI writes a new rule for that sender, so the next sync handles it without AI. It never sends, moves or deletes mail. It runs on my iPhone and isn’t public yet: its Google sign-in is still in testing mode.
Why I built it
Most of what lands in an inbox isn’t a conversation. It is an order, a bill or a renewal, and the one thing you need from it is buried inside the email. I wanted the inbox to hand that thing back.
- Arriving
- Due
- Renewing
- Subscriptions
- Invites
Read-only. Never sends, moves, or deletes mail.
Who came after
- +5 moGmail AI Inboxwas announced with suggested to-dos, such as a bill due tomorrow, and catch-up updates, such as an order delivered.8 Jan 2026
The first version, with orders, bills and subscriptions, went in on 21 August 2025. I put it down and rebuilt it as NoMail in August 2026, so the date here is the first commit, not the rebuild.
Already there before me. Gmail already put packages arriving that day at the top of the inbox, and from July 2025 it had a page for unsubscribing from mailing lists. Shortwave and Superhuman already summarised email with AI.
Clarity
Three months before Glean made context its pitch. Seven months before Atlassian called its graph the context layer.
An early-warning system for when a company’s execution drifts from what it decided.
What it does
Clarity reads the tools where work happens, such as Slack and Gmail, and builds a graph of decisions, the reasoning behind them and what came of them. Each morning it sends leaders a memo on where execution has drifted, and an investigate view traces each signal back to its cause.
Why we built it
While building AssetWorks AI we hit a wall: giving the model all the context made it too expensive to run, and trimming the context made its answers unreliable. We built an engine that finds the minimum context a decision needs. Then we saw the same gap inside companies. Strategy is set at the top, and its reasoning gets lost at every layer on the way to execution.
Co-founded with Ram S.
Who came after
- +3 moGleanpitched its context graph as the way to spend far fewer tokens.28 May 2026
- +4 moGartnertold delivery teams to build context engineering into how they ship.16 Jun 2026
- +6 moGlean:GOlaunched products to capture, route and apply company context.30 Aug 2026
- +7 moAtlassianpositioned its Teamwork Graph as the context layer for enterprise agents.9 Oct 2026
- +8 moUviraised a $7.5M seed to turn Slack, Jira and Confluence into business context for agents.14 Oct 2026
Already there before me. “Context engineering” got its name in mid-2025, and Microsoft’s Work IQ, the “context graphs” thesis and OpenAI Frontier all came before our first commit, so we don’t claim to be first. I haven’t found anyone else shipping a drift signal or a daily drift memo.
Shortcut Generator
Two months before Apple announced it at WWDC.
Describe an Apple Shortcut in a sentence and get the shortcut file back.
What it does
You type what you want, for example “tell me the weather and my battery level”. Claude turns it into a list of Shortcuts actions, and a compiler writes the .shortcut file. A gallery lets people download and remix each other’s shortcuts. All eight commits landed in one afternoon. It stayed a prototype: the files it writes are unsigned, and Apple only imports signed ones.
Why I built it
In the Shortcuts app you build each automation by finding actions and wiring them together by hand. Here, one sentence does the wiring.
Who came after
- +2 moAppleannounced “Describe a Shortcut” at WWDC: Shortcuts builds the steps from your description. It shipped to everyone in iOS 27 on 14 September 2026.8 Jun 2026
A week after I started, MacStories’ Federico Viticci began a similar open-source tool, released in May 2026. That was parallel work, not a follower.
Already there before me. People tried GPT-written shortcuts on r/shortcuts in 2023, a Claude Code skill that writes signed shortcuts appeared in January 2026, and reports that Apple was working on this surfaced a week before I started.
FlowPilot
Ten days before edelkrone launched a dolly for self-filming. Ten weeks before it let ChatGPT and Claude drive its gear.
An iPhone in a motorized gimbal, turned into a camera robot that performs the move you ask for.
What it does
It drives an Insta360 Flow 2 Pro through Apple’s DockKit, with no Insta360 SDK. You draw a camera move on the screen or pick one from a catalogue of 21, and the gimbal performs it with cinematic easing. An AI shot planner turns a description of the shoot into an ordered shot list built only from those moves. A second phone, home-screen widgets and an Apple Watch app start and stop a take from across the room. It runs on my iPhone and isn’t in the App Store yet.
Why I built it
A solo creator is the whole crew, and often the subject too. There is nobody else to hold the camera, so the camera has to move by itself, on cue.
Who came after
- +10 daysedelkrone Dolly GOlaunched for self-filmers: a motorized base that carries a phone gimbal and joins the positions you mark into a smooth path.12 Aug 2026
- +2 moedelkrone MCPconnected its motion-control gear to ChatGPT and Claude, so you describe a move in plain words and the assistant runs it.11 Oct 2026
Already there before me. edelkrone’s motorized JibONE dates back to 2020, and its app already chained saved positions on its own sliders and jibs in early 2026. Insta360 and DJI phone gimbals tracked subjects through DockKit from 2024. What came after was edelkrone moving toward phone-gimbal creators and plain-language control.
Credably
Nobody has followed yet. Still the only one I’ve found proving the money landed in the bank.
Proof of what Indian software businesses actually earn, so they can be bought, sold or lent against.
What it does
A founder connects a read-only payment account and gets a public profile with revenue that was checked, not claimed, plus a badge for their own site. Buyers make offers, and an accepted offer opens a deal room that runs from NDA to letter of intent, purchase agreement and escrow.
Why I built it
Every global verified-revenue directory reads Stripe, and none of them can read a rupee from Razorpay, Cashfree or UPI. The metric doesn’t transfer either. RBI caps recurring debits without OTP at ₹15,000, so a lot of Indian software revenue is one-time or annual, and an MRR leaderboard shows an empty India. Credably’s headline number is verified 30-day net revenue, and the bank settlement can be proved through India’s Account Aggregator network.
Who came after
Too early to tell. I started it in August 2026, and I haven’t found a launch since that moves toward it.
Already there before me. TrustMRR (November 2025) made verified revenue a public leaderboard and marketplace, and VerifiedMRR.in (April 2026) already verifies Razorpay revenue in India. I haven’t found anyone else proving bank settlement through Account Aggregator or using a metric built for non-recurring revenue.
Start dates are first commits in each repository. Every later launch links to its source.