I made $1.6M+, cut my costs 61% and work 4 hours a week (thanks to AI)
$1,616,235 in revenue since 2021, no employees. How AI agents cut my running costs 61%, and what they could cut next.
My SaaS has taken $1,616,235 through Stripe since October 2021. I have no employees. AI agents handle support, deploys, monitoring, email and ads. The AI costs about $117 a month, and anything that spends money or messages a person waits for me.
I built my SaaS business (https://parakeet.chat/) entirely manually (yes, I coded it all by hand, like a dinosaur), so I admit AI didn’t create the revenue, but now it runs the business with:
- Zero payroll (all the employees are gone)
- Minimum attention required from me, about 4 hours a week (my favorite part)
- The AI keeps cutting my costs (beyond replacing all the employees)
Expenses
2024 (Pre-AI world) The biggest costs are the product itself: text messages and the servers that run everything.
Costs keep falling, everything it takes to run the business went from $71k a half-year at the end of 2024 to $27.5k in the first half of 2026, down 61%.
Replacing SaaS with AI, Open source, and vibes
An agent went through my expenses line by line (It’s already integrated with my accounting software) and investigated what each charge was for.
Anything that could be replaced with an AI model directly, or an open-source self hosted program, or a simple program the AI could vibe code itself was out.
The agents did the migrations and built what was missing: from a command-line tool and an AI assistant for the new help desk to the code that has a AI model write the horoscopes (Many of our users enjoy reading them).
| Was | Now | Saved / yr |
|---|---|---|
| Auth0 | Better Auth | $959 |
| Zendesk | Libredesk | $1,452 |
| Sentry, New Relic | GlitchTip | $1,578 |
| Sports API | ESPN, free | $828 |
| Horoscopes, site | AI, Cloudflare | $692 |
| Total | $5,509 |
- Auth0 charges per active user, so it grew with every signup: $231 in its last month. The agents moved everything to Better Auth, an open-source library, and Auth0 came out in October.
- Zendesk became Libredesk, an open-source help desk on my own server, with the AI desk assistant built in.
- The horoscope API fed a daily horoscope feature. A model writes them now.
- Sentry became GlitchTip, an open-source tracker that accepts the same error reports, on a server I already pay for. New Relic went to its free plan rather than to GlitchTip.
Potential future cost reduction
Text messages are one of the two biggest costs left, next to servers. Today I buy every text from an SMS provider through its API, about $0.007 a text with carrier fees. In theory a phone farm could cut about half of it, the half that goes through my shared pool of numbers (each user’s personal number stays with the provider): a rack of Android phones on ordinary unlimited plans that send and receive the texts themselves, at a flat $15 or so a phone however many texts it sends.
Coding that myself would be a pain in the ass: an Android app that sends and receives texts, a server that spreads messages across the phones, and something that notices when a phone dies, a SIM gets blocked or a message goes missing. Weeks of work, then babysitting it. With agents it’s feasible: they already drive my Android phone over USB, they can write the app and the server, and they already watch my servers around the clock.
I set the same thing up for other teams. If yours still does this by hand, get in touch.