KAI · 2026-06-04

I Built My Own ChatGPT Because Theirs Kept Throttling Me

A founder's note on shipping KAI, what's actually in it, and why $19/mo.

It was a Tuesday. I was 40 minutes into debugging a Stripe webhook signature mismatch — the kind of bug where you're three browser tabs deep in their docs and you've stopped trusting your own eyes. I asked ChatGPT for a second opinion and it gave me the response I now hate more than the bug itself:

You've reached the message limit for GPT-4. Please try again in 3 hours or upgrade.

I was already on GPT Plus. Twenty dollars a month. For the privilege of being told to wait three hours during the one hour I actually needed it.

That night I started building KAI.

What KAI Is (and Isn't)

KAI is a paid chat product at kai.wheellsverse.com. $19/month, cancel anytime, no annual lock-in.

It is not: a ChatGPT clone, an Anthropic reseller, a wrapper over a single model's API. There are dozens of those and most of them are worse than just paying OpenAI directly.

What it actually does that I couldn't get elsewhere for $19:

1. Both OpenAI and Anthropic, on the same chat. I switch between GPT-4o

and Claude inside one conversation — same memory, same context, same thread. I built this because I was constantly copy-pasting between two tabs. When Claude is being weirdly preachy I flip to GPT mid-message. When GPT is being lazy I flip to Claude. The router knows.

1. Memory across conversations. ChatGPT's memory is two sentences of

"user is a developer." KAI's memory is structured: it knows what repos I'm working on, what stack each one is on, which clients I bill hourly vs flat rate, and which of my dumber decisions I've already regretted so it doesn't recommend them again. I store the memory; OpenAI doesn't see it; I can wipe it.

1. Real tool access. Notion, GitHub, Linear, Slack, 200+ SaaS apps

wired through Composio. Not "we can describe an API call you might want to make" — actual execution. I ship blog posts to my Notion CMS from inside the chat. I close Linear tickets. I push a TODO comment in code and 10 minutes later a Linear ticket exists.

1. Unlimited chat. No 3-hour cooldown. No GPT-3.5 fallback. No

"limited responses." I burned 4,000 messages in week one debugging the auth layer. Cost me ~$11 in OpenAI tokens to serve. You pay $19, I pocket the difference, and we both stop losing afternoons to message caps.

Why $19 and not free

I tried the free tier. Watched it for two weeks. Free users sent embarrassingly few messages — most of them stopped after 2 days. People who pay show up. People who pay tell me when something's broken. People who pay don't try to scrape the system prompt and resell it.

$19 also covers actual costs. The marginal token spend per active user is around $4–7/month. Stripe takes 3%. AWS-equivalent compute is whatever my Mac mini's electricity bill divides into. The remaining margin pays for the next feature instead of a marketing department.

What I'm not going to lie about

KAI is a one-person product launched yesterday. Here's what that means:

• No SOC 2. No HIPAA. If you handle regulated data, don't use this yet.
• I'm the only person on call. If the server is down at 4am Eastern,

it's down until I wake up. (It hasn't been, but I'd rather you know.)

• The UI is functional, not pretty. I optimized for "doesn't feel slow"

before "looks like a SaaS landing page."

• Some features I'd love to ship (voice, image gen, long-document RAG)

are not in v1. They're on the roadmap. They are not in the product.

If those are dealbreakers, pay OpenAI directly. They have a UI team and compliance officers and an actual support inbox. I have a Telegram bot that pings me when the server logs an error.

The honest comparison

If voice and image gen are the features you use, KAI is wrong for you. If you bounce between Claude and GPT and want both on one bill with memory and real tool execution, KAI is probably the right $19 you'll spend this month.

How to try it

kai.wheellsverse.com. Sign up with an email, $19/mo on Stripe, cancel any time from the dashboard. No annual plan, no "starter discount that auto-upgrades to enterprise pricing" trick. The price on the landing page is the price you pay.

If you sign up and it's wrong for you, email me from the address you used. I'll refund you the same day and you can tell me what was missing.

What you can do for me

If you build with KAI and ship something good, tell me. I'll add a "made with KAI" wall on the site. I want to see what people make with two models and a memory.

If you find a bug, the support email goes to my actual inbox, not a help-desk queue. Response time is under 12 hours and I haven't slept through one yet.

If you think this is a bad idea, also tell me. Building in public includes accepting feedback from people who think you're wrong.

Now I need to go close out my Stripe dashboard before I cry.

— Built by a one-person team. Hosted on a Mac mini. Powered by other people's models. Worth your $19, or your money back.

*This post was hand-written, not generated. The launch URL is real: kai.wheellsverse.com. The Mac mini detail is also real.*