Background

This is the build-in-public journal for TokenScale. Every few days I post the real traffic numbers, what they mean, and where I think things are heading. I try to explain everything in plain terms, the same way the tool tries to make AI pricing make sense.

New here? The numbers will make more sense if you know the story first. TokenScale was built on a phone, by someone with no traditional coding background, over 11 months of AI conversations. The story page is the right place to start. Then come back here to follow along.

01 30 May 2026

12 Days In: 1,400 Visitors, a Netherlands Mystery, and What Comes Next

TokenScale launched on 18 May 2026. No budget, no team, no existing audience. Just a single HTML file on Cloudflare and a LinkedIn post.

Twelve days later, here's what the data looks like. And more importantly: what I think it means for where LLM pricing is heading.

The Numbers

Unique visitors
~1,400
May 18 to 30
Peak day
486
May 20 · launch
Cache hit rate
92%
Cloudflare avg
Infra cost
$0
Cloudflare free

The Shape of the Launch

Unique visitors per day · May 18 to 24
70
May
18
69
May
19
486
May
20
164
May
21
119
May
22
94
May
23
86
May
24

May 20 was the day I posted to Hacker News (Show HN) and LinkedIn simultaneously. Traffic jumped from a 70/day baseline to 486 unique visitors. The following days settled into a floor of around 85 to 90 per day. Nobody paid for that. It just held.

Product Hunt went nowhere. I launched cold with no community, ended at #82 with 2 points. That was expected. PH rewards existing audiences, not new ones. Hacker News was the real driver.

Where Traffic Came From

1
🇳🇱 Netherlands
309
2
🇺🇸 United States
190
3
🇩🇪 Germany
51
4
🇸🇪 Sweden
34
5
🇨🇦 Canada
29

Netherlands at #1 with more traffic than the US. I still don't know exactly why. Hacker News skews heavily toward Northern European readers, so that is probably part of it. Something may also have been shared in a Dutch or German developer community I'm not aware of. If you came from one of those: I'd genuinely love to know where.

What I do know: EU developer communities responded faster than the US ones. That's useful information for where to focus outreach next.

What the Pricing Chaos Showed

May 2026 was one of the most volatile months in LLM pricing history. On or around May 15: OpenAI's o3 Pro dropped 80%. xAI Grok dropped 83%. DeepSeek dropped 75%. Gemini Pro went up 60%.

These are enormous moves. And most developers had no simple way to track them. The tool launched at exactly the right moment. Not because I planned it that way, but because AI pricing has become genuinely hard to follow.

The nightly price history in TokenScale is now 12 days old. Every day that passes adds something no competitor can buy back.

How It Was Built

One HTML file. No framework. No backend. No build step. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages for free. Built entirely on my phone, using Claude, over about 11 months of conversations.

I'm not a programmer in the traditional sense. I'm an animation professional who started building things by talking to AI in 2025 and couldn't stop. The nightly price check that now runs automatically at 8pm? That's also a prompt. It searches 16 provider pages, writes a JSON file, takes a backup, and tells me what changed. No server. No pipeline. Just a scheduled task.

My Prediction

Prediction Written 30 May 2026. I'll respond to these next post.
→
Price change events will become the main growth driver. Every time a major provider moves pricing, developers search for comparisons. TokenScale should catch that traffic organically, without any promotion. The nightly update cadence exists exactly for this.
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The baseline will hold at 80 to 100 visitors per day until the next catalyst: a Reddit post, a Dev.to article, or a significant model price announcement. Those are the levers I haven't pulled yet.
→
The price history dataset becomes a citation. By September, if the nightly data keeps running, TokenScale will have the most complete public record of LLM pricing changes available anywhere. Journalists and researchers will eventually link to it. That is the long game.
→
Pricing will keep falling, fast. The 80% drop in o3 Pro is not an anomaly. It is the direction of travel. Commoditisation is happening at speed. The tools that help developers navigate it will matter more, not less, as the noise increases.

Next update in a few days. Drop me a note if you have a question or a pricing anomaly worth investigating: willbilton@gmail.com