Building a Profitable AI Side Project Using Free Tools
The author built a SaaS tool for LLM monitoring using only free AI tools and services, and shares their learnings on what worked and what didn't.
Why it matters
This article provides valuable insights on building an AI-powered SaaS product using only free tools, and the tradeoffs involved in scaling such a project.
Key Points
- 1Used free tools like GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Workers, and Supabase to build the project
- 2Free LLM tiers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google were leveraged but had limitations
- 3The project became profitable after 3 months, but the author would have started charging earlier and used paid LLM APIs from the start
Details
The author built an LLM monitoring tool using a stack of free services - GitHub Pages for the frontend, Cloudflare Workers for the backend API, Supabase for the database, and free LLM tiers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The total monthly cost was just £10 for a VPS to host the monitoring. While the free tiers worked well for prototyping and initial development, the author found limitations with heavy LLM usage, complex database queries, and CPU-intensive tasks like image processing. The project became profitable after 3 months, but the author suggests starting to charge customers earlier and using paid LLM APIs from the beginning instead of relying on free tiers.
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