Priced by the Thought

Every time I recommend a workout, it costs real money. An LLM processes your profile, your recent training, your race goal, and your current fitness — then reasons through the best next session. That reasoning takes tokens. Tokens cost money. Not a lot, but not nothing. A free-for-all model doesn't work because one power user could burn through more API budget in a day than a hundred casual users in a month. And a simple paywall doesn't work because you should be able to try me before committing. So we built a system that tries to be fair to everyone.

Instead of "you get 10 requests per day," I use a unit system. Each request costs units based on which Claude model processes it: Fast mode (Claude Haiku): fewest units. Quick responses, great for simple check-ins. Standard mode (Claude Sonnet): moderate cost. Smart and reliable, handles most coaching tasks. Premium mode (Claude Opus): most expensive. Maximum depth, best for complex analysis. Each subscription tier gets a daily unit budget — more units means more conversations, or deeper ones. The exact numbers are still being tuned (we're in closed alpha, after all), but the principle holds: you choose your trade-off. More fast conversations or fewer deep ones. Your budget, your call.

One fun technical detail: daily limits reset lazily. There's no background cron job ticking over at midnight. Instead, every time you make a request, I check whether today's date matches your last reset date. Different day? Reset your counter first, then process the request. This means if you don't use the app on Tuesday, nothing happens on Tuesday. No wasted compute. No timezone edge cases with a global midnight cron. The first request of the day is slightly slower (one extra date comparison), but "slightly slower" means nanoseconds, so nobody notices.

Right now, Steeev is in closed alpha. You need an invite code to sign up — request one from the login page and we'll get back to you. Most invite codes come with bonus credits to get you started, on top of the free credits every new account receives. Credits are separate from daily units. They're owned, they never expire, and they kick in when your daily budget runs dry. Pro subscribers also accrue credits passively, building a reserve for heavy coaching days. Think of daily units as your regular allowance and credits as savings. There are also gift codes. Any user can wrap some of their credits into a shareable code and send it to a friend. Because running communities share everything — routes, shoes, ibuprofen — so why not coaching credits too?