I run 2 companies on a $5 AI stack. Here's exactly how.
No $200 ChatGPT Plus. No enterprise contracts. Just n8n, DeepSeek, and open-source tools that actually work.
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"I got banned from ChatGPT. It cost me $147. That ban saved my business."
I was running AI workflows on ChatGPT Plus — $20/mo, reliable, simple. Then one day, OpenAI flagged my account. Banned. No warning. No appeal process that made sense. $147 in API credits locked behind a deactivated account.
That forced me to find alternatives. I discovered n8n, learned to self-host on a $3.50 VPS, and switched to DeepSeek V3 via OpenRouter at $0.50 per million tokens. My costs dropped from $200/mo to under $5.
Now I run two companies — Authentic Education and Botsquash — from Bangladesh and Cyprus, entirely on open-source AI tools.
I document everything so you don't waste money on AI that doesn't deliver.
No theory. Just what works.
Every piece of content comes from running real businesses with real AI.
Real Workflows
Complete n8n automations with screenshots and actual code. No diagrams — real JSON exports you can import.
Cost Breakdowns
Exact dollar amounts. Self-hosted vs SaaS pricing compared line-by-line so you know where every cent goes.
Operator Lessons
Running AI-automated businesses day-to-day. What breaks, what scales, and what I'd do differently.
The $4.78/mo AI stack
Click any tool to see exactly how I use it and what it costs.
n8n Self-hosted automation engine
200+ integrations. Runs on a $3.50 Hetzner VPS. Zero vendor lock-in. Full control over your workflows. I run 47 active automations across both companies from a single instance.
DeepSeek V3 OpenRouter, $0.50/1M tokens
Outperforms GPT-4 on coding and reasoning benchmarks. Costs 40x less than GPT-4 Turbo. No rate limits on OpenRouter. I process ~2.4M tokens per month across all workflows.
Jina AI Web search & embeddings
REST API for web search, content extraction, and embeddings. I use 0 paid APIs — Jina's free tier covers all web scraping and search needs for both companies with room to spare.
Open WebUI Chat interface, self-hosted
Clean ChatGPT-style UI that connects to any LLM via API. Self-hosted on the same VPS. No data leaves my server. I use it for ad-hoc queries, brainstorming, and quick prototyping.
Get the $5 AI stack breakdown
Plus weekly workflows I actually use. No theory. No fluff.
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