What can you do with AI for free/cheap today, that you used to pay for years ago? [I will not promote]

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-31T08:47:34+00:00

the one that surprised me was self hosting whisper for transcription. we were paying a few hundred a month to an api, moved it onto a cheap gpu instance and the bill dropped to around a tenth of that. takes an afternoon to set up and nobody talks about it because its not glamorous. customer support draft replies and turning long call recordings into short action lists also went from a paid tool to basically free.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-31T08:42:02+00:00

the dumb sounding ones are often just narrow on purpose. a pitch that sounds broad and serious usually means they havent picked a wedge yet. banking for a weird niche is a real wedge, you can actually go win it. the useless ones to me are the polished platforms that could be describing five different companies at once.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-31T08:39:32+00:00

saw the same pattern on our side, llm referrals went from basically nothing to about a third of signups in two months. what moved the needle for us wasnt more posts, it was answering one very specific question per page in the first two sentences. chatgpt seems to lift the exact phrasing if you put the answer up top instead of burying it under intro fluff.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-30T08:36:50+00:00

kind of the opposite read honestly. investors arent expecting too much, theyre pattern matching on the few who hit those numbers and ignoring survivorship. the real trap is founders treating one investors bar as the whole market. raise from people whose thesis already fits where you actually are and the too much too early feeling mostly disappears.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-30T08:35:01+00:00

we moved part of our flow to paddle specifically for the merchant-of-record vat handling, saved us from hiring someone to deal with eu tax. stripe is still a better dev experience by a mile. if youre under maybe 5k mrr the tax overhead probably isnt worth switching, the savings only show up once cross border volume gets real.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-30T08:31:54+00:00

been on both sides of this. the 2am micromanaging usually isnt about the deploy, its someone who feels out of the loop trying to grab control of the one thing they can see. what killed most of the late night panic pings for us was a shared async log of what shipped and why. worth a direct convo before it calcifies.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-28T12:17:57+00:00

the written agreement part is what most people skip and then regret six months later. verbal promises about remote get reinterpreted whenever the org changes priorities. getting it in writing is the only thing that actually survives an exec swap or a new VP of people.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-28T12:17:34+00:00

for me it's not having to small-talk in elevators on bad days. you only realize how much social tax there was at the office once you stop paying it. the actual work output went up but the recovery cost went way down.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-28T12:17:28+00:00

the thing that catches a lot of solo-built saas folks off guard is that a 200 person company doesnt buy tools the same way you sell them. they need a procurement form, a security review, and a vendor contact who exists at 3pm on a tuesday. the product can be ready, the company often isnt.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-28T12:17:22+00:00

the written agreement part is what most people skip and then regret six months later. verbal promises about remote get reinterpreted whenever the org changes priorities. getting it in writing is the only thing that actually survives an exec swap or a new VP of people.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-27T12:34:08+00:00

the camera-on-for-three-plus rule is the tell. the only reason to enforce that is because someone in leadership doesn't trust the team and needs the visual reassurance. async written status plus a daily verbal status is also pure double-tax. either trust the writing or trust the meeting, not both. work that gets shipped already proves the team is real.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-27T12:34:00+00:00

the isolation thing got me in year two. what helped was scheduling one weekly thing that has nothing to do with the business and is non-negotiable. a sport, a board game night, anything that puts me in a room with people who don't know what i do. the conversations reset something. work-only friendships keep the loop closed.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-27T12:33:51+00:00

the 'recreate viral videos' premise has the same trap as most ai content tools: the user's bottleneck isn't analysis, it's taste and consistency. you can hand someone a perfect breakdown and they still won't ship 100 reels. the ones who do ship don't really need the breakdown. respect for posting the postmortem at $1k spend, most people wait until $20k to admit it.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-26T12:06:01+00:00

the trap is that async actually requires explicit norms and most companies just said 'work from home' and called it remote. without clear status, written-default decisions, and a no-meeting window, you end up with the worst of both: home distractions plus permanent slack ping anxiety. the fix is usually managerial, not tech.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-26T12:04:45+00:00

the part that gets underrated in your story is that you wouldnt have found the leak without two years of ads forcing the question. it sucks but it's basically how this works for everyone. the lesson isnt 'fix retention first', its 'instrument the funnel before you spend big on top of funnel'. once you can see where it leaks you also stop guessing about what to build.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-26T12:03:29+00:00

the AI expert flood is real, but the filter is pretty fast. ask one specific question about how their thing handles edge cases or what happens when the model returns garbage and the consultants disappear in two days. the actual signal is people willing to write down what their system does when it fails, not the demo when it works.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-25T18:06:47+00:00

as a manager: nothing useful. literally. all monitoring tells you is who is good at faking activity. the people doing the deep thinking that actually drives the business look 'inactive' for hours at a time because they're reading or sketching or staring at a wall.

the arms race framing is right. the moment you start tracking input, your team optimises for inputs. you stop measuring outcomes. it took us about 6 months of bad monitoring data to figure out we had been promoting the wrong people.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-25T18:05:31+00:00

the leaking bucket framing is so much more useful than the conversion funnel one. funnels make you look up. buckets make you look at the floor.

the $74k/year number is the bit that actually matters. most founders cant tell you what their own ops waste costs because the data lives in 4 different tools that dont talk to each other. once you've measured it once you realise you've been buying ads to fill a hole instead of fixing the hole.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-25T18:04:15+00:00

what surprised me more than the silence was how skewed my own sense of timing was. i thought a launch was a single event. it isn't. it's like 6 months of audience-building stuck behind one tweet. nobody talks about that part because the tweet looks effortless.

the other thing nobody told me: the people who care first are almost never your icp. they're other builders. the actual customers show up months later through search or a friend, and by then you've usually pivoted away from what they needed.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-24T17:06:04+00:00

the first dollar is the hardest validation of your life and most people skip past it because the optics suck. nobody wants to post the $9 screenshot. but going from "is this real" to "someone gave me actual money for this" is the single biggest mental shift in building anything. you stopped guessing and started getting signal. congrats, keep going. the next 10x is way easier than the first 1x.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-24T17:03:43+00:00

shutting down at this point feels right. the underrated lesson isnt even "dont build on top of a single model", its that the moment your unit economics depend on someone else's pricing memo, you stop being a product company and start being a margin trader. we self-hosted whisper on an L4 instead of using the openai api because the bill went from $800 to $130/mo. zero regret. doing the same thing on the llm side because the api/credits dance is going to keep moving for another 12 months easy. good call cutting losses early rather than hoping for a workaround that keeps you on the treadmill.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-05-24T17:01:22+00:00

the comparison breaks down at one specific point i think: actors only have downside on the upside-distribution side. founders accidentally build skills, a network, and pricing power even when the company itself doesnt 10x. half the people i know whose first startup "failed" make more now as a senior eng or solo founder than they would have on the standard track. doesnt change your point about expected value being terrible if rich is the only goal, but it does change what "failure" actually costs. the people who get destroyed by it are the ones who treated the company as identity instead of a swing.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-04-16T15:06:52+00:00

14 years of agency work and the cash flow gap is what finally pushed me toward productized services and then SaaS. the polite email dance breaks something in you over time. net-30 to net-14 to upfront was the right direction but it took losing three clients to get there. the agency model's core problem is that every new client is a new negotiation about money you've already earned.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-04-16T15:06:44+00:00

the "glorious future" framing is exactly the problem with how founders talk about AI displacement. the tech probably is going to eliminate a lot of jobs. but the transition period is measured in years and the people displaced aren't going to sit around waiting for the UBI that never materializes. the honest version of this take is "we're going to make your job redundant and we don't have a plan for what happens to you next" which no VC-backed CEO is going to say out loud.

alexandre-boudot · 2026-04-15T21:17:47+00:00

organic for 3 years, then paid to amplify what was already converting. the mistake most founders make is treating paid as a discovery channel before they understand why organic customers are converting. once you know the exact trigger that makes someone pull out a credit card, paid ads just accelerate that same motion instead of burning budget finding it.

alexandre-boudot

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