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.

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.

Plus, I don't like that there isn't any spending limits based on the API token, apparently it's per "workspace".

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.