Everything is fintech??
Fintech’s defining risk was that a few bad customers could sink the company. SaaS never had that; abuse was bounded by the product.
Inference cost removes the bound and now anyone that offers inference in their product has to build a fraud stack! Excited to see the next generation of fraud companies + evolution of existing providers to tackle this.
Fintech’s defining risk was that a few bad customers could sink the company. SaaS never had that; abuse was bounded by the product.
Inference cost removes the bound and now anyone that offers inference in their product has to build a fraud stack! Excited to see the next generation of fraud companies + evolution of existing providers to tackle this.
Vulnerable post: I spend 90% of my time on @chatprd dealing with increasingly creative international token fraud operations, and it makes me want to shut down the company. Mostly to steal Opus tokens on resold promo codes or in the time between a trial start + our fraud alerts infra.View quoted post on X
It's cost me tens of thousands of dollars and it gets worse every day. Luckily the company is nice and profitable, but every time it happens it bums me out in extreme ways.
I love ChatPRD, I think at this point we've helped PM, engineers, and founders with millions of products + features. We are still a top 3 writing GPT (completely free!) on ChatGPT, we've kept generous trial periods, and have kept annual sub costs super reasonable, even for the enterprise. We've let people use the latest models when they come out, and have built in new features like prototyping without adding to our fees. We haven't had to limit usage, because our customers have been so great.
Building the product is incredibly fun, it's an actual footprint by which I get to test all this AI stuff, as an engineer, founder, and product builder. I have my little grok bot army that runs ops. We've been pen tested multiple times, SOC2ed, and work with some of the biggest companies out there.
It's my labor of love, and I keep it going (even though there are probably higher leverage things I could be doing with my time.)
But it's horrible to have our small team spend basically all of our time shutting down that Indonesian fraud ring, or that Egyptian code farm, or the Chinese signups that have been on an auto loop for the last 24 hours. I feel like I'm constantly making product calls that trade protecting from abuse vs giving our users an amazing experience (and keeping maintenance overhead low.)
It's basically sucked the joy out of my first little AI win, and I'm really sad about it.
And before you bucket me into dumb-little-vibecoder, trust that I know what I'm doing. I run our firewall like it's my full time job. We are stripe radar'd up to the gills. We have rate limits + so many automated triggers and controls.
But each one of these things ends up touching legitimate users and prospects. And every time I rachet up one control, I end up causing annoyance or pain to a real user. It's a trade that's hard to manage.
And honestly? It's not fun.
It just feels bad to see so many bad people.
So I have some thinking to do, but for now
- free trials are dead on chatprd, sorry kids
- i think in 2027 i might ban all non-US business
- and tbh, may retreat to the warm waters of 100% enterprise business, who are a) willing to pay more and b) have more interesting product needs
And if you're a little solo founder or startup that has dealt with this - I see you. I have some tips + tricks that might help. You're not dumb, and it's not easy.
Ok. Rant over.
Back to building the little wrapper who could 💕
