Dan Lee

21 · solo dev from Korea 🇰🇷 · building Brello (AI API cost guardian) in public

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

If your OpenAI/Anthropic API key got leaked and you're staring at a surprise bill — DM me before you contact support.

I'm helping devs get refunds for free right now. The first message you send matters more than you think.

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@PhosphorMac I use shadcn/ui. It makes building landing pages way faster and they look great out of the box. Plus there are tons of registries with ready-made components to pull from.

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@PhosphorMac First sale is huge, congrats 🎉 Did you post it as a launch/showcase, or more like "here's a problem I solved"?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

Day 3 of building Brello in public.

Shipped a landing page and a free scanner two days ago.
Visitors so far: 15. Total. Across both.

Lesson I already knew but needed to feel: shipping isn't distribution. Nobody comes if you don't tell anyone.

So today I'm actually telling people. Brello helps indie devs who run products on AI APIs when things go wrong: leaked keys, surprise bills, and models getting pulled (OpenAI retires a batch today).

What got you your first 100 visitors?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@dawidjakszewicz Hundreds of attempts → your own model. That's the way 🔥 Would love to see a breakdown of what you learned sometime.

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@devsolojr 53 followers in 20 days is solid, congrats 🙌 Founder morale is underrated. Most of us quit from burnout, not bad ideas. Are the daily messages written by you or generated based on what the founder is going through?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@PhosphorMac makes sense, reddit's been good to me too (hi 👋). what kind of posts got you the most traffic?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

My last product was free and still nobody used it.

This time, 3 days in, someone asked me for help before I even had a product.

The difference wasn't the features. It was how much it hurt.

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

When your API key leaks, you face an ugly choice:

Revoke it now → your app goes down.

Keep it alive while you redeploy → someone keeps burning your money.

Most advice assumes you have time to rotate safely. In a real leak, you don't.

Which one would you pick?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@yourMOMSsidelad Solid order. But during a real leak, keeping the old key alive while you redeploy means it keeps getting abused. Do you revoke right away and eat the downtime, or wait?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

Ever had to rotate a leaked API key in a hurry? How long did it take, and did your app go down while you did it?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@devsolojr Followed! Looking forward to your updates 🙌

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@Flo_oskar Nice! How do you handle backups and monitoring now? That's the part that always scares me about self-hosting.

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@dherault111 Nice setup. What happens if the key itself leaks though? App-level caps wouldn't catch someone calling the API directly. Do you rely on the provider's budget alerts for that?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

Quick question for indie devs running AI features in prod: how do you watch your API key usage?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@Monetisedev Totally agree. Spend alone doesn't tell you much. Do you track cost per workflow today? And would you want something to stop execution automatically, or just alert you first?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@shahryarab64292 What made you set it up? Did something happen?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@real_mpi Nice, so the feedback platform runs Ordana as a partner widget? Curious what the 32% was measured on, signups or paid?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@itshimanshugup Feels good to know I'm not the only one. What's been working best for you so far, devlogs or short clips?

[Dan Lee @danlee0824]

@real_mpi Interesting. What kind of SaaS was it, and who ended up integrating the widget?