I Put a $0.02 Paywall on My AI API. Here's What I Learned.

I built an MCP server that audits Solana tokens for rug pulls. It calls three external APIs per request, runs results through an LLM, and generates a risk report. Every audit costs me about $0.015 to run. I knew from the start that offering it for free wasn't sustainable - one popular agent could burn through my API budget in hours. But I also didn't want to spend weeks building billing infrastructure for a side project. Here's what I did instead.