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Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

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Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#21

Post by ppcvote »

Western0 wrote: post #13

Why not local models? W H Y ?

My setup is WSL2 on a regular Windows machine — no GPU, so local inference would be painfully slow Gemini 2.5 Flash free tier is genuinely good enough — 1,500 req/day, I use ~105. Quality is solid for content generation and analysis tasks $0/month is hard to beat — I did accidentally rack up $127 when I used a billing-enabled API key (wrote a blog post about that lesson), but with free tier properly configured, it's been zero cost for months If I needed more throughput or privacy-sensitive processing, I'd consider local models. But for my current scale, free tier Gemini handles everything.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#22

Post by ppcvote »

jimmis wrote: post #12
brunohaid wrote: post #10

OK, the whats the endgame for flooding the zone with agent outputs question aside: The visualization of what the agents are up to in the "office" on the dashboard is incredibly cute.

I thought so too... but if you refresh the page, it's just a pre-baked animation. A fun idea for somebody though; a little aquarium full of bots doing fake office tasks (I'm sure it's been done already).

The animations are CSS-driven, but the data behind them is real — agent heartbeats, task counts, and activity logs are pulled from actual systemd timer outputs. It's not a mock dashboard, though I'll admit the visual polish probably makes it look more "produced" than a typical monitoring tool.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#23

Post by ppcvote »

A bit of context on why I built this:

3 months ago I had zero experience with any of this — no AI development, no automation, no open source. I'm a solo founder in Taiwan where smartphone penetration is nearly universal but AI adoption in daily work is still very early.

As I started building, I realized these tools can genuinely change how people work and live — not just for developers, but for small businesses and solo operators who don't have engineering teams. So I packaged what I learned into services and open-sourced the playbook.

This is also my first time posting on HN. My English isn't strong enough to write essays natively, so I use AI to help with the writing — but the ideas and intent are mine. Seemed fitting given what I'm building.

I'm not trying to sell anything here. I just want to show that you can run real operations with AI agents on zero budget, and I want to make these tools more accessible in my country.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#24

Post by evanelias »

ppcvote wrote: post #16
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #4

What's your MRR?

Good questions, happy to answer all of them: Revenue: Comes from client projects — I run a small tech agency (SaaS builds, AI integrations, brand websites). The agents handle lead gen and content so I can focus on delivery. MindThread (Threads automation SaaS) is also generating subscription revenue. Multiple accounts: MindThread is a legitimate SaaS product using Meta's official Threads API. Clients manage their own…

The comment you're replying to only asked a single question, which you actually failed to answer.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#25

Post by [deleted] »

ppcvote wrote: post #20
brunohaid wrote: post #10

OK, the whats the endgame for flooding the zone with agent outputs question aside: The visualization of what the agents are up to in the "office" on the dashboard is incredibly cute.

Thanks! The dashboard is one of my favorite parts of this project. It actually pulls real agent activity data — the visualizations are live, not pre-rendered. Working on making it a product: customizable agent dashboards for other teams running multi-agent setups.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#26

Post by evanelias »

ppcvote wrote: post #17
hk1337 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be okay with it generating the posts and the reports of the financials and such but you need some human interaction in there. Generate the posts with AI so it can free up your time to interact with people replying to the post. Or write the bigger, longer, more content posts yourself with maybe some AI assistance in places here and there then use AI to create smaller posts from your larger posts. Still keeping wit…

100% agree. Content generation is where agents shine — it's repetitive and time-consuming. But genuine engagement is where trust gets built, and that needs to be real. My engagement scripts do auto-reply to comments on my own posts, but they're rate-limited and context-aware (max 2 rounds). For anything meaningful — client conversations, community discussions like this one — it's always me.

> For anything meaningful — client conversations, community discussions like this one — it's always me.

In a six-minute time period, you posted 10 different comments here, totaling nearly 800 words. I don't believe you are being truthful.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#27

Post by ppcvote »

evanelias wrote: post #24
ppcvote wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good questions, happy to answer all of them: Revenue: Comes from client projects — I run a small tech agency (SaaS builds, AI integrations, brand websites). The agents handle lead gen and content so I can focus on delivery. MindThread (Threads automation SaaS) is also generating subscription revenue. Multiple accounts: MindThread is a legitimate SaaS product using Meta's official Threads API. Clients manage their own…

The comment you're replying to only asked a single question, which you actually failed to answer.

My monthly side income now covers 20x my Claude subscription plus a pork rice bowl with an extra egg — and it only took three months, without touching my main job hours. Honestly that's kind of insane, which is why I had to share this.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#28

Post by ppcvote »

evanelias wrote: post #26
ppcvote wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. Content generation is where agents shine — it's repetitive and time-consuming. But genuine engagement is where trust gets built, and that needs to be real. My engagement scripts do auto-reply to comments on my own posts, but they're rate-limited and context-aware (max 2 rounds). For anything meaningful — client conversations, community discussions like this one — it's always me.

> For anything meaningful — client conversations, community discussions like this one — it's always me. In a six-minute time period, you posted 10 different comments here, totaling nearly 800 words. I don't believe you are being truthful.

"Fair catch on both points. The batch of replies: I had a list of expected questions and drafted answers beforehand. When I finally had time to respond, I posted them all at once. Not real-time typing — that's why the timing looks suspicious. Should've spaced them out. On MRR: I dodged it. Honest answer — client project revenue is irregular (project-based, not subscription), so I don't track it as MRR. MindThread subscription revenue is early and small, I'm not comfortable putting a number on it publicly yet. What I can say: it covers my infra costs and Claude subscription with room left over. Not life-changing, but real

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#29

Post by ppcvote »

I want to address the skepticism directly. Yes, my English is poor. I write everything in Chinese first, then use AI to translate. Every word is mine — the ideas, the context, the intent. The AI is just the bridge. If that feels like cheating, I understand. But it's the only way I can participate in conversations like this one. On whether my products are useful: probably not to most people here. Taiwan has one of the most advanced tech industries in the world, but 80%+ of the population still doesn't use AI in their daily work — or only uses it as a chatbot. The market here is flooded with people selling AI courses and prompt-engineering services. I'm trying to do something different: actually build with it, open-source the playbook, and make real tools accessible to people who aren't engineers. I came to HN because I wanted real technical feedback — even brutal feedback. You can't get that in Taiwan right now. The criticism here is exactly what I was looking for. I'm a real person. These are real products. I'm just learning in public, one translation at a time.

Re: Show HN: AI agents run my one-person company on Gemini's free tier – $0/month

#30

Post by veunes »

Impressive numbers for a spam bot, but what's the point if the content is generated by an LLM and the comments are written by other agents? The internet is already turning into an endless feedback loop of generated garbage where the only goal is to scrape leads from other bots

You're spending 7% of your free tier limit just to keep an "audience" of 27 accounts on life support. The real question is: how many of those 12k followers actually convert to revenue instead of just sitting there as dead weight? If the ROI from these accounts doesn't even cover the engineering hours you spend babysitting those 62 scripts, this isn't a business, it's just a hobby

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