Ship an AI chatbot in your app in 5 minutes (with budget caps)

The fastest way to ship an AI chatbot has nothing to do with chat UI libraries. On opix, it's one prompt inside your project:

"Add a support chatbot that knows my services, prices and opening hours. Friendly, short answers, German. If it can't help, offer the contact form. Cap it at $10/month."

Here's what that sentence buys, and why the cap at the end is the important part.

Minute 1-2: the bot gets built

opix generates the chat UI into your app's code — streaming responses, conversation state, and a system prompt containing the knowledge you described. It's real code in your repo, so tuning the bot's voice later is either another sentence or a hand edit.

The backend is the interesting bit: instead of asking you for an OpenAI key, opix wires the chat to its AI gateway — a metered endpoint that runs server-side. There is no key to create, paste into an env var, rotate, or leak in a client bundle. The classic chatbot security mistake is structurally impossible.

Minute 3: the cap

You set a monthly AI budget for the app — the gateway enforces it server-side. This is the difference between "we added AI" and "we added AI and can sleep": if a stranger decides to chat with your bot all night, the worst case is a polite "try again later" when the cap is hit, never a four-digit surprise on your card.

Usage lands on the same live meter as your builds, priced per conversation, so you can watch what the bot actually costs and adjust the cap with data instead of fear.

Minute 4-5: publish

Publish the app and the bot ships with it. From there, everything is describable: "escalate pricing questions to email", "stop answering medical questions", "make it terser". And if you ever eject, the gateway call is a normal server route in your code — a developer can point it at any provider account.

Beyond the widget

The same gateway powers any AI feature — summaries, drafting, classification — and via connectors the bot can reach Telegram or Slack on your own accounts. The pattern stays the same: describe the behaviour, cap the budget, own the code.

Total damage: a few build credits (visible on the meter), $0 for anything that failed along the way, and a hard ceiling on what the bot can ever cost you. That's the whole trick — and it's free to try.