Prefex · the badge and the budget

Every agent call on your ledger, with a receipt that counts only what the lab’s cache did not already give you.

One base_url change. Per-engineer attribution, budgets, and routing to the cheapest model that will pass, for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and eleven backends. Runs on your machine; never metered by us.

Free 60 days·~20MB binary·localhost-only·honest receipts

prefex · localhost:8019 live
Saved by Prefex
$4.61 this session
incremental, beyond the native caching you already get free
prompt cache$2.91
routing$0.88
compression$0.61
memory$0.21
coach3 prompts repeat the same 2k preamble. Consolidate them to save about $0.40 a week.
99% cache hitmodel sonnet50% ctx used
While you work

Don't just spend less. Learn to spend less.

A monthly invoice never changed anyone's behavior. Prefex coaches the habit inline, in the moment, so the savings actually change how you work, not just what you read in a report.

Live coaching, in the moment:

consolidate 3 repeated prompts
Honest, measured

Real savings, with a receipt for every token.

Numbers from real sessions, read from the provider's own billing fields, not computed by us. What you save depends on your workload, which is exactly why the dashboard shows you the receipt per request instead of a headline.

$25,969
saved
$4,210
spent
60%
cut, all-in
28,882
logged requests

From the maintainer's own machine, March to May 2026. Every figure is read from the provider's own billing fields, not computed by us. Your numbers depend entirely on your workload, which is why the dashboard shows you the receipt per request instead of a headline.

The lab's cache, shown for context. The 88% below is the model provider's own prompt caching, which you already get free and which we take no credit for. It is here so the receipt underneath has something to sit against.

Round 1, coldno cache yet
~$0.042
Round 2, warmsame prefix, cached
~$0.005 · 88% saved
Number on your dashboardWhat it meansWhose credit
Saved by PrefexWhat routing, trimming and limits added beyond the native caching you already get free.Prefex
vs no optimization at allEvery token repriced at full strong-model rate with no caching discount. The bigger number, shown only for context.mostly the provider's free caching

Most eye-catching "X% saved" figures elsewhere are really Anthropic's native caching, which you get without us. Prefex only takes credit for what it adds.

Flagship · Prefex

Every token, from any lab, cheaper and more useful.

Twelve layers and a dozen-plus optimizations in one proxy. Drop it in front of your existing client, change nothing else, and watch a local dashboard account for every cent.

01

Staffing the turn

Every turn is assigned to the cheapest model that will pass it, and the hard ones stay with the senior. An explainable rules router decides, you can read why, and you can overrule it per project. Routing is table stakes now; what matters is that the decision is on the record.

02

Prompt-cache assist

Prefix detection, a cache warmer, prefix-stabilization, and prewarm-on-switch keep your cached context hot — including pre-paying the re-write before a model switch or a proxy stop, so you never eat the cold-turn spike.

03

Compression

Lossless-first compaction of tool output, logs, and JSON. Cache-boundary-safe and recoverable. Never lossy on code.

04

Cross-session memory

Typed facts extracted from your sessions and re-injected by project, so a new session starts with what the last one learned. Strictly project-scoped: one project's memory never leaks into another.

05

Session handover

When a session ends, prefex distills a structured note — goal, progress, key files, blockers, next steps — and hands it to your next session in that project. Injected once, cache-safely, so continuity costs nothing per turn.

06

Spend limits and token traps

Loop guards, think-caps, and lean reasoning catch runaway turns before they bill.

07

Niti, the security desk

Allow, ask, or deny on every tool call, in 3.7 ms — starting in observe mode, where nothing is denied and you just watch. A signed, hash-chained audit that carries derived facts and never raw arguments. Mapped to CMMC, ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, and SOC 2.

08

Receipts & coaching

Savings attributed per mechanism, in honest incremental terms, then surfaced inline as you work so the numbers actually change how you spend.

09

Encoder routing

An optional on-device encoder, a frozen ModernBERT trunk that runs fully offline, scores prompt complexity for sharper routing than rules alone. Opt-in and default-off; the fast heuristic router runs until you switch it on.

10

Spend watcher

A background sentinel reads your live request stream and flags the expensive stuff the moment it happens: big cold cache writes, prefix flapping, rate limits, and spend spikes, straight to your status line.

11

Output shaper

Trims model verbosity on mechanical turns — measured ~11% fewer output tokens, the ones that bill at 5× input and never cache. Honest number, honestly measured.

12

Every tool, one daemon

prefex wrap codex (or aider, cursor, zed) routes any tool through the same shared daemon — one dashboard, one savings ledger, per-tool attribution. Codex rides the OpenAI Responses API natively. Pricing for ~3k models resolves automatically from an embedded snapshot; unknown models are flagged, never silently guessed.

The dashboard

See exactly what it's doing.

A local dashboard at localhost:8019: honest savings per request, every layer, full control. No account, localhost-only, no auth.

localhost:8019 / Home
Prefex dashboard Home: honest savings headline and per-layer cards
Home. The honest savings headline (what Prefex added beyond the free native caching), a labeled counterfactual, and every optimization layer at a glance.
localhost:8019 / Activity
Prefex dashboard Activity: full request log
Activity. Every request with model, cache hit %, cost, saved, and latency. Drill into projects and sessions.
localhost:8019 / Coach
Prefex dashboard Coach: suggestions from your own traffic
Coach. Suggestions computed from your own traffic: prompt consolidation, expiring cache, context cleanup.
localhost:8019 / Settings
Prefex dashboard Settings: every optimization layer
Settings. Every layer, model tier, and price editable in one place. Connect Claude Code, Cursor, and more.

// shown with sample data, localhost-only, your data never leaves your machine

The lineup

One thesis, a growing toolkit.

Every PromptForce tool is local-first, single-binary, and honest about what it does. We launch with Prefex. ReadyBase is next. More are in the distillery.

Prefex / prefix, extended
● Live
Spend less on agent seats, with receipts.

A local-first proxy for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and anything that speaks the Anthropic or OpenAI API. Smart model routing, prompt-cache assist, cross-session memory, request compression, and spend guardrails, all behind one base_url change. It shows the honest savings it adds beyond the native caching you already get free, request by request.

ReadyBase
In benchmark
Make your codebase AI-ready.

A dependency and co-change graph that scores how ready your repo is for AI agents, and guards high-blast-radius edits. It knows which files are cold, hot, and risky, so your agents (and Prefex) work with context, not guesswork.

More in the works
Distilling
Drawn from the best of the ecosystem.

We study the sharpest ideas in AI tooling and rebuild the ones that clear our bar as native, fail-open tools. The roadmap follows the thesis below.

Editions

Early access now. Pro when your team needs it.

Try the full toolkit on your own machine, no strings. Add team features when you are ready.

Early Access
Free · 60 days
The complete local toolkit.

Every optimization layer, the full dashboard, all of Prefex, free for 60 days. No credit card, no call-home. Renew online in a click when the trial ends. Your keys and prompts never leave your machine.

Pro & Team
On request
For teams that share a stack.

Shared caches, organization-wide routing policy, per-developer attribution, budgets and spend alerts, SSO, and consolidated billing, built on the same single binary. Available on request, tailored to your setup.

The guarantee

If the ledger shows less saving beyond native caching than the licence in a month, that month is free. Scoped to accounts whose agent seat spend is at least three times the licence — below that the licence is not the thing costing you money, and we would rather say so than sell you one. The ledger is the same one you read on your own dashboard; we do not get a second set of numbers.

Docs

Read the guides.

Two short reads: running Prefex solo, and rolling it out across a team.

Install Prefex

Two commands. Then change one setting.

Download, review the script, run it. The installer starts Prefex and connects Claude Code for you.

Early Access

Run it now — nothing below is gated. Free for 60 days, no credit card; the licence flow handles the trial on its own. Leave an email only if you want the release notes and the benchmark scripts.

1.
Download & review the install script
Run prefex preview first to see exactly what would change.
$curl -fsSL https://promptforce.ai/install.sh -o install.sh && less install.sh
$bash install.sh
2.
Open the dashboard & restart Claude Code
Prefex runs on :8019. The installer connects Claude Code, so restart it to activate.
$open http://localhost:8019/dashboard

~20 MB standalone binary, zero dependencies. Your prompts and keys never leave your machine.

1.
Download & review the install script
$curl -fsSL https://promptforce.ai/install.sh -o install.sh && less install.sh
$bash install.sh
2.
Open the dashboard & restart Claude Code
$xdg-open http://localhost:8019/dashboard

~20 MB standalone binary, zero dependencies.

1.
Download & review the script
PS>iwr https://promptforce.ai/install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
PS>Get-Content install.ps1 | more
2.
Run it, then open the dashboard
PS>.\install.ps1
PS>Start-Process http://localhost:8019/dashboard

Requires PowerShell 5.1+ and Windows 10/11. Windows support is lightly tested, issues to contact@daytwoai.com.

Works with your tools

Or just change one value.

Prefex is a local proxy. Anything that lets you set a custom API base URL works out of the box.

# ~/.claude/settings.json
{
  "env": {
    "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "http://localhost:8019"  // add this
  }
}
ToolHow to connectStatus
Claude CodeSet ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL in ~/.claude/settings.jsonAuto-configured
CursorSet ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var in your shellSupported
Continue.devSet apiBase per model in ~/.continue/config.jsonSupported
AiderRun with --api-base http://localhost:8019Supported
Codex CLIprefex wrap codex, routes this session onlySupported
Python / Node SDKPass base_url="http://localhost:8019" to the clientSupported
Built for agents too

Coding agents can read llms.txt and AGENTS.md for install and config context, or call the MCP server directly at /api/mcpsearch_catalog, get_install_command, get_product_overview.

Your prompts never leave your machine.

Prefex runs entirely on localhost. No telemetry, no analytics, no external logging. If any internal component fails, requests pass through to the upstream API unchanged. Prefex never blocks a request because of its own failure.

# All outbound traffic should go only to api.anthropic.com
sudo tcpdump -i any -n 'dst port 443' 2>/dev/null | grep -v api.anthropic.com

Uninstall is one command. It stops Prefex, restores settings.json, and (with --purge) deletes ~/.prefex.

Full privacy & data-handling details →   Uninstall & guide →
The PromptForce family

Two planes, one boat

Prefex makes every AI token cheaper. ReadyBase makes every token count. Run either alone. Running both is strictly additive.

Cost plane

Prefex

A proxy that makes every agent token cheaper, with receipts. Prefex rows cheaper.

Explore Prefex →
Time plane

ReadyBase

Makes your AI coding tool act like it grew up in this codebase. ReadyBase steers smarter.

Explore ReadyBase →
Get started

Download, review, run. Savings from the first request.

macOS, Linux & Windows · ~20 MB binary · zero dependencies · free for 60 days, no obligation.

View on GitHub →
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Get Early Access

Prefex is in Early Access, free for 60 days. Tell us where to send your install link and the occasional update.

We store your name, email, and company only to send your link and product updates. Local-first as ever: your prompts and keys never touch our servers.

You're in. Welcome aboard.

Install Prefex on macOS or Linux with one line. Windows and full instructions are on the page.

$curl -fsSL https://promptforce.ai/install.sh | bash
Full instructions →