This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
Product upvotes vs the next 3
Waiting for data. Loading
Product comments vs the next 3
Waiting for data. Loading
Product upvote speed vs the next 3
Waiting for data. Loading
Product upvotes and comments
Waiting for data. Loading
Product vs the next 3
Loading
Culpa
Find the exact conversation behind every AI dollar
Culpa traces every AI dollar to the exact user, feature, conversation and retry loop that caused it, then forecasts what new features will cost before they run. Stop guessing at AI spend and start fixing it. Local-first so your prompts never leave your infrastructure. Find the culprit behind every spike, see which customers and workflows burn margin, and price new features and products with data instead of instinct.
👋 I’m Zolani, founder of Culpa. Thanks to @istiakahmad for hunting us today. Culpa started while I was building another AI product and kept running into a question I couldn’t answer cleanly: why did the bill increase, and what exactly moved it?
💭 Provider dashboards could show me models, tokens, calls, and total spend. Other telemetry products could show me aggerate spend. And sure, that was useful but when you’re responsible for unit economics, you need to know which customer, feature, conversation, workflow, or agent step caused the increase. I kept ending up in spreadsheets, logs, and guesswork.
💡 Eventually I realised we didn’t have a cost-data problem. We had an ownership problem. Every dollar needed an owner, and I wanted to be able to follow that dollar backwards until I could see exactly what created it.
🚀 So I built Culpa, a local-first LLM cost, margin, and forecast ledger. It follows spend from the bill down to the customer, feature, conversation, workflow, agent step, and individual call, then helps you connect those costs to revenue and forecast what a feature, cohort, workflow, or launch could cost before you run it.
🔎 The launch trace shows what that means in practice. In this example, our trace recorded 6,621 model calls, and one conversation alone generated 2,438 calls and $946.43 in model cost. Culpa didn’t just tell us that the conversation was expensive, it showed us where the behaviour changed.
Turn 1 carried 30,157 tokens and Turn 2 carried 62,411. By turn 18, context had reached 164,926 tokens, and by the final turn it had reached 867,161. The model hadn’t changed and no new feature had shipped. It was just that the conversation kept carrying more of its own history into later calls, and the first major change was visible at Turn 2.
⚙️ That level of attribution matters because context creep is only one culprit. Retry loops, failed calls, agent fan-out, fallbacks, model drift, and background work can all move the bill without an obvious increase in customer activity. I wanted Culpa to show where the extra work started instead of giving you another chart that says spend went up.
🔐 Culpa runs on your infrastructure, and your prompts and responses never leave it. It works by counting calls to run your plan. That makes setup slightly more involved than sending everything to a fully hosted service, but I’m ok with that trade because I don’t think your conversation content should need to come to us for you to understand what it cost.
🛡️ It also fails open. If Culpa can’t record a call, your call still runs. A cost tool has no business becoming the reason your production application goes down.
🎯 Culpa is for technical founders and small AI teams who pay the model bill themselves and need to understand the economics underneath it. It becomes particularly useful once a single customer action can hide planning, retrieval, tools, reviewers, retries, and dozens of separate model calls.
It isn’t for everyone; If every customer brings their own provider key and you never see or pay the model bill, Culpa probably won’t add much value.
❤️ The principle behind Culpa is simple: your AI bill should be explainable. You should be able to start with a dollar and follow it back to the action that created it, then look forward and understand what the next feature or launch could do to the bill before you ship. Show the number. Show the working.
🎁 For Product Hunt, we’re opening the first 100 Culpa workspaces at $199 for the founding year. Builder normally works out to $480 over 12 months, so that’s effectively seven months free. Find your first culprit and activate within seven days to keep the founding price.
One thing to know before you click. Culpa asks for a card at signup, trial included. Nothing charges for 14 days. You get two reminder emails before it does, and cancelling takes one click.
🙏 One question for the thread: can you name the single most expensive conversation your product had last month, and explain why it was the most expensive?
I’ll be here all of today. Tell me what breaks, what’s unclear, or what Culpa still can’t answer.
Zolani
About Culpa on Product Hunt
“Find the exact conversation behind every AI dollar”
Culpa was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 58 upvotes and 10 comments, placing #17 on the daily leaderboard. Culpa traces every AI dollar to the exact user, feature, conversation and retry loop that caused it, then forecasts what new features will cost before they run. Stop guessing at AI spend and start fixing it. Local-first so your prompts never leave your infrastructure. Find the culprit behind every spike, see which customers and workflows burn margin, and price new features and products with data instead of instinct.
On the analytics side, Culpa competes within Analytics, Developer Tools and Artificial Intelligence — topics that collectively have 1.2M followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Culpa performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Culpa?
Culpa was hunted by ISTIAK AHMAD. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
ISTIAK AHMAD
Hey Product Hunt,
👋 I’m Zolani, founder of Culpa. Thanks to @istiakahmad for hunting us today. Culpa started while I was building another AI product and kept running into a question I couldn’t answer cleanly: why did the bill increase, and what exactly moved it?
💭 Provider dashboards could show me models, tokens, calls, and total spend. Other telemetry products could show me aggerate spend. And sure, that was useful but when you’re responsible for unit economics, you need to know which customer, feature, conversation, workflow, or agent step caused the increase. I kept ending up in spreadsheets, logs, and guesswork.
💡 Eventually I realised we didn’t have a cost-data problem. We had an ownership problem. Every dollar needed an owner, and I wanted to be able to follow that dollar backwards until I could see exactly what created it.
🚀 So I built Culpa, a local-first LLM cost, margin, and forecast ledger. It follows spend from the bill down to the customer, feature, conversation, workflow, agent step, and individual call, then helps you connect those costs to revenue and forecast what a feature, cohort, workflow, or launch could cost before you run it.
🔎 The launch trace shows what that means in practice. In this example, our trace recorded 6,621 model calls, and one conversation alone generated 2,438 calls and $946.43 in model cost. Culpa didn’t just tell us that the conversation was expensive, it showed us where the behaviour changed.
Turn 1 carried 30,157 tokens and Turn 2 carried 62,411. By turn 18, context had reached 164,926 tokens, and by the final turn it had reached 867,161. The model hadn’t changed and no new feature had shipped. It was just that the conversation kept carrying more of its own history into later calls, and the first major change was visible at Turn 2.
⚙️ That level of attribution matters because context creep is only one culprit. Retry loops, failed calls, agent fan-out, fallbacks, model drift, and background work can all move the bill without an obvious increase in customer activity. I wanted Culpa to show where the extra work started instead of giving you another chart that says spend went up.
🔐 Culpa runs on your infrastructure, and your prompts and responses never leave it. It works by counting calls to run your plan. That makes setup slightly more involved than sending everything to a fully hosted service, but I’m ok with that trade because I don’t think your conversation content should need to come to us for you to understand what it cost.
🛡️ It also fails open. If Culpa can’t record a call, your call still runs. A cost tool has no business becoming the reason your production application goes down.
🎯 Culpa is for technical founders and small AI teams who pay the model bill themselves and need to understand the economics underneath it. It becomes particularly useful once a single customer action can hide planning, retrieval, tools, reviewers, retries, and dozens of separate model calls.
It isn’t for everyone; If every customer brings their own provider key and you never see or pay the model bill, Culpa probably won’t add much value.
❤️ The principle behind Culpa is simple: your AI bill should be explainable. You should be able to start with a dollar and follow it back to the action that created it, then look forward and understand what the next feature or launch could do to the bill before you ship. Show the number. Show the working.
🎁 For Product Hunt, we’re opening the first 100 Culpa workspaces at $199 for the founding year. Builder normally works out to $480 over 12 months, so that’s effectively seven months free. Find your first culprit and activate within seven days to keep the founding price.
Get it here:
If you want to claim a seat straight away
https://getculpa.com/?offer=founding100
Or run it free for 14 days and decide after.
npm i -g getculpa
One thing to know before you click. Culpa asks for a card at signup, trial included. Nothing charges for 14 days. You get two reminder emails before it does, and cancelling takes one click.
🙏 One question for the thread: can you name the single most expensive conversation your product had last month, and explain why it was the most expensive?
I’ll be here all of today. Tell me what breaks, what’s unclear, or what Culpa still can’t answer.
Zolani