Lately the software industry feels… loud.
There's been a lot going on in the industry. Big companies making moves, things shifting around. Enough noise that I just wanted to build something small again.
So I did.
Nothing fancy. Just me poking at the Anthropic API to see if I could make something out of it.
The idea
Every day, the app generates one motivational quote tied to something that happened on that date. You open the page, it figures out your “today”, checks if a quote already exists, and if not, generates one. Then it caches it and serves the same thing for the rest of the day.
So instead of random quotes, it's:
“What happened today, and what can I take from it?”
Under the hood it's just a single flow: check if today's quote exists, otherwise generate it, store it in TinyDB, return it. I cached it so I don't accidentally burn money on Anthropic. I used claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 which is the tiniest one since this only needs one call per day at most, even if people hit the page multiple times.
The prompt
Early versions returned generic quotes that could've come from a fortune cookie. So I tightened it — give it a category list (Science, Technology, Music, Pop Culture, Space, etc.), tell it to pick a high-impact event, explain it in two sentences, then ground the quote in that specific event. Under 25 words. No clichés.
The difference was noticeable. It went from "believe in yourself" energy to quotes that actually feel tied to something real.
The frontend
It's a fake terminal. The page loads with a little typing animation, pretends to run a command, then reveals the quote. There's a dark/light toggle, a database modal styled like a psql shell where you can browse past entries, and a copy button.
None of it was necessary. I just liked the aesthetic.
Cost
Around ~400 tokens per generation.
That's roughly:
~$0.002/day
<$0.06/month
Because of caching, it's usually just one API call per day.
Edge case: if someone in a different timezone is already in the next day, it can trigger the next day's quote early. So worst case, you get ~2 calls around the day boundary. The browser actually passes its own timezone, so "today" is genuinely your today — not the server's.
The rough edges
A few things that annoyed me while building this:
- No per-API-key spending limits
You can only set limits at the workspace level. So if you want fine-grained
control over how much a single project can spend, you're out of luck. It's all or nothing.
- No console API for usage data.
I can't query my actual spend or token usage programmatically. The only way to track it is to pull the token counts from each API response and store them yourself — which is exactly what I ended up doing.
- Claude.ai and the Anthropic API are completely separate.
If you're paying for Claude Pro thinking you can use it to build things — you can't. API access is billed separately. Your subscription gives you zero API credits.
So anyway, the stack is intentionally boring. Flask, TinyDB, gunicorn, Docker, Nginx. Python because I haven't touched it in a while.
Well… technically I didn't touch much code either.
The app is live at motivation.katpadi.ph.
Just wanted to build something small, understand the tooling a bit more and ship it.
I just need a daily motivation from all of the chaos.