I built a $2/month AI assistant and hosted it myself — here's the full architecture I got tired of the token-counting anxiety. Every time I used the Claude API directly, I was watching the meter tick: 1,000 tokens here, 5,000 tokens there. A long debugging session could cost $3-4 in a single sitting. So I built a flat-rate wrapper. Same Claude model underneath. Fixed $2/month. No per-token billi