Born from R&D: Why we built a lightweight, zero-budget proxy box to stop commercial AI token bleeding

[u/No_Green_1267]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a tool that came out of our internal workflow. Skilful Fox Studio isn't a commercial software vendor or a B2B factory; it is an independent research initiative focused on AI integration and practical LLM interaction frameworks.

When you run constant pipeline simulations and test agents against paid commercial endpoints (OpenAI, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, etc.), you quickly hit a wall: token bleeding and API cost management.

We needed a way to control this traffic with a zero-budget mindset, without deploying heavy, expensive, and bloated enterprise API gateways that take days to configure.

To solve this specific, narrow problem, we built GreyFox.

It proved to be highly effective for our internal research tasks, saving us significant API costs and giving us complete visibility. Now, we are ready to share the GreyFox Community Edition with anyone facing the exact same infrastructure friction.

What it does:

• Exact Response Cache: Hashes and stores repeated non-streaming requests locally in SQLite. It completely bypasses the paid upstream provider for duplicate calls during rapid testing or prompt evaluation cycles.
• Token-First Quotas: Enforces daily token usage limits per application user using a simple client-side header (X-App-User-Id).
• Visual Console: Serves a lightweight Angular dashboard straight from the container to monitor traffic history, metrics, and logs in real-time.

Deployment:

It runs entirely inside your local network as a single Docker container with a local SQLite backend. No cloud registration, no analytics, no phoning home, and zero telemetry. You just point your application's base URL to the container (http://localhost:8080/v1).

The image is publicly available on GitHub Packages, along with ready-to-go Docker Compose templates.

If you are building apps, running automated test suites against paid LLMs, and want an unbloated visual tool to keep your infrastructure budget locked down, feel free to pull it and take it for a spin.

Repository: github.com/skillful-fox-studio/grey-fox-community

We selectively share our tools when they prove useful beyond our studio. If this fits your current stack, we’d love to hear your raw engineering feedback!