⬢ AI Stack Tracker — Film + Dev Kolkata · Student(LPU) + Faculty(SRFTI) · Hikuptah Studios

All prices are AI-generated estimates in INR/month — nothing is verified until you verify it. Red = never verified. Weekly ritual at the bottom of this page. Data lives in this file; your edits live in localStorage until you Export & commit.
MY MONTHLY STACK (status = using)
₹0
GST is reclaimable as ITC if Hikuptah's GSTIN is on the invoice — untick to see net cost.
FRESHNESS
—
ONE-TIME / CAPEX WATCHLIST
  • DaVinci Resolve Studio — ~₹27k–35k verify
  • Used RTX 3090 24GB — ~₹60k–90k (rent first, then buy)
  • 64GB RAM + 2–4TB NVMe
  • Google Play $25 one-time · Apple $99/yr (ask SRFTI re: institutional waiver)

Tools & Programs

ToolSideCategoryCost model ₹/mo estStatusMy verdict / notesVerified

The 20-Minute Weekly Ritual

  1. 0–7 min — read your feed digest. Highest signal-to-noise: GitHub Releases atom feeds (every repo exposes /releases.atom) for ComfyUI, Ollama, llama.cpp, faster-whisper, Cline, Continue, Aider, SAM 2. Then Hugging Face trending + the org pages of labs you care about (BFL, Qwen, Tencent Hunyuan, Stability, Zhipu, Mistral). Then OpenRouter's models/pricing page — the single most efficient source for keeping API prices current.
  2. 7–15 min — tick "stale (>90d / never)" above. Open those 5–8 rows, verify price/free-tier/licence on the vendor's own page only, fix the number, hit ✓Verify.
  3. 15–19 min — add max 2–3 new tools. Archive anything dead. This cap is non-negotiable.
  4. 19–20 min — Export JSON → paste into the DATA block in this file → commit. Git history is your changelog.
Cadence tiers: A = weekly (active subscriptions, telecom offers, claim deadlines, API prices) · B = monthly (major film/dev products) · C = quarterly (stable OSS, perpetual software, education programs — they change slowly).
Do not build price scrapers. Vendor pricing pages are JS-rendered, geo-varied and A/B tested; they'll break weekly. Automate only link-checking and staleness reports (optional GitHub Action), keep humans on prices.
Never trust aggregators. "Best AI tools" newsletters and directories are affiliate-driven and routinely list stale or fictional pricing — discovery only, never a source of record.

Standing Reminders

Licence firewall: education licences (Autodesk, JetBrains Edu, Nuke NC, Houdini Apprentice/Edu) → teaching + PhD only. Hikuptah client work needs commercial licences. This is the #1 way this strategy backfires.
Non-commercial model weights commonly misused: FLUX.1-dev, XTTS-v2, MusicGen (CC-BY-NC). Safe: FLUX-schnell (Apache-2.0), Qwen-Image, SDXL, SAM 2, ACE-Step, Stable Audio Open, Chatterbox (MIT).
Free-tier rights: Suno/Udio/ElevenLabs free output generally carries no commercial rights. Rights attach to the plan active at generation time.
Payments: Indian cards frequently fail recurring international auto-debits (RBI e-mandate/tokenisation). Web checkout is usually cheaper than app-store purchase. Annual billing saves 15–20% — but only after a tool survives a full month of real use.
Privacy: don't route client footage, unreleased material, or SRFTI institutional data through third-party cloud AI or cheap third-party model endpoints. DPDP Act 2023 + NDAs apply. Local WhisperX/ComfyUI exist partly for this reason.
Reproducibility: pin ComfyUI + model versions per project (snapshot or container). A mid-project update breaking a client deliverable is a real, common failure.
India synthetic-media labelling obligations are evolving — check current disclosure rules before delivering synthetic voice or likeness commercially.
AI Stack Tracker — Film + Dev — Subhasis

⬢ AI Stack Tracker — Film + Dev Kolkata · Student(LPU) + Faculty(SRFTI) · Hikuptah Studios

All prices are AI-generated estimates in INR/month — nothing is verified until you verify it. Red = never verified. Weekly ritual at the bottom of this page. Data lives in this file; your edits live in localStorage until you Export & commit.
MY MONTHLY STACK (status = using)
₹0
GST is reclaimable as ITC if Hikuptah's GSTIN is on the invoice — untick to see net cost.
FRESHNESS
—
ONE-TIME / CAPEX WATCHLIST
  • DaVinci Resolve Studio — ~₹27k–35k verify
  • Used RTX 3090 24GB — ~₹60k–90k (rent first, then buy)
  • 64GB RAM + 2–4TB NVMe
  • Google Play $25 one-time · Apple $99/yr (ask SRFTI re: institutional waiver)

Tools & Programs

ToolSideCategoryCost model ₹/mo estStatusMy verdict / notesVerified

The 20-Minute Weekly Ritual

  1. 0–7 min — read your feed digest. Highest signal-to-noise: GitHub Releases atom feeds (every repo exposes /releases.atom) for ComfyUI, Ollama, llama.cpp, faster-whisper, Cline, Continue, Aider, SAM 2. Then Hugging Face trending + the org pages of labs you care about (BFL, Qwen, Tencent Hunyuan, Stability, Zhipu, Mistral). Then OpenRouter's models/pricing page — the single most efficient source for keeping API prices current.
  2. 7–15 min — tick "stale (>90d / never)" above. Open those 5–8 rows, verify price/free-tier/licence on the vendor's own page only, fix the number, hit ✓Verify.
  3. 15–19 min — add max 2–3 new tools. Archive anything dead. This cap is non-negotiable.
  4. 19–20 min — Export JSON → paste into the DATA block in this file → commit. Git history is your changelog.
Cadence tiers: A = weekly (active subscriptions, telecom offers, claim deadlines, API prices) · B = monthly (major film/dev products) · C = quarterly (stable OSS, perpetual software, education programs — they change slowly).
Do not build price scrapers. Vendor pricing pages are JS-rendered, geo-varied and A/B tested; they'll break weekly. Automate only link-checking and staleness reports (optional GitHub Action), keep humans on prices.
Never trust aggregators. "Best AI tools" newsletters and directories are affiliate-driven and routinely list stale or fictional pricing — discovery only, never a source of record.

Standing Reminders

Licence firewall: education licences (Autodesk, JetBrains Edu, Nuke NC, Houdini Apprentice/Edu) → teaching + PhD only. Hikuptah client work needs commercial licences. This is the #1 way this strategy backfires.
Non-commercial model weights commonly misused: FLUX.1-dev, XTTS-v2, MusicGen (CC-BY-NC). Safe: FLUX-schnell (Apache-2.0), Qwen-Image, SDXL, SAM 2, ACE-Step, Stable Audio Open, Chatterbox (MIT).
Free-tier rights: Suno/Udio/ElevenLabs free output generally carries no commercial rights. Rights attach to the plan active at generation time.
Payments: Indian cards frequently fail recurring international auto-debits (RBI e-mandate/tokenisation). Web checkout is usually cheaper than app-store purchase. Annual billing saves 15–20% — but only after a tool survives a full month of real use.
Privacy: don't route client footage, unreleased material, or SRFTI institutional data through third-party cloud AI or cheap third-party model endpoints. DPDP Act 2023 + NDAs apply. Local WhisperX/ComfyUI exist partly for this reason.
Reproducibility: pin ComfyUI + model versions per project (snapshot or container). A mid-project update breaking a client deliverable is a real, common failure.
India synthetic-media labelling obligations are evolving — check current disclosure rules before delivering synthetic voice or likeness commercially.