I Spent $6 on AI and 10 Hours on a Blog Automation That Didn’t Work…
I’ve been taking some time to go automate.
I’m paying for all these services and had drifted - jobs, friends, life - and it felt like time to get my hands dirty again.
There’s a lot of talk about AI “democratizing” everything. But most of the automation I see feels like sales funnel stuff: Layered, expensive, subscription-heavy. Feels less like democratization and more like gatekeeping in a new wrapper.
So I’ve been sitting with a question: "Can AI automation be useful for real people doing real things?" Or is it just snake oil? Sssss!
Because if all we’ve done is swap traditional service providers for VC-backed AI tools that cost just as much (and do half as well), what’s the point?
I wanted to drop a post today bragging about all my slick AI workflows. But I spent 10 hours trying to automate pushing my LinkedIn posts to my website and ended up rebuilding them manually. So, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . You can absolutely do it. But not for “free.”
Here’s what I do have running so far:
• A scenario that generates posts in my voice using random post formats (PAS, IIR, SIA, etc.) I don’t actually use this because it doesn’t feel like it serves anyone here but I’m going to cannibalize it to make it more of a technical research blog generator for my personal site.
• A companion image generator (currently shelved due to bad results - working on better prompts + swapping Dall-E for GPT-1 Image). Curious about making something similar to try and produce relevant infographics for research posts.
• A daily image poster to Buffer -> Twitter/Bluesky that rotates through a folder of weird AI art.
• A resume/cover letter generator that tailors to job posts. It drops into docs, where I review before sending out. Dude, I’ve applied for over 100 jobs I was super qualified for and haven’t heard a peep. This market is f*cked. Sue me.
• A news scraper that gives me 3-bullet summaries, stripped of clickbait and fluff, directly into Notion. This one is great for a headline scroller like me.
• A weekly cleaner that keeps that news feed fresh
• A Notion task sync from Google Calendar (less useful now, since Notion added native support)
I didn’t come into this knowing anything so I wanted to dip my toe in before announcing my AI allegiance. My stack includes:
• ChatGPT Plus
• OpenAI wallet. A whopping $6 spent in 3 months - use GPT o3 for the basics
• Make-com (not sure it’s cheaper than n8n once you get going)
• Hexa, Leonardo-ai (regrettable annuals)
• and the usual suspects: Notion, Dropbox, Google.
What am I missing? What are you building that actually helps?
This isn’t a lead-gen scheme. I’m trying to figure out whether there’s a real path forward for small teams and individuals. Or if it’s all just hype and SaaS paywalls.
What are you working on? Let’s share notes. Let’s build weird.
Leave your API keys in the comments:
