The Free AI Stack (And The 2 Landmines Nobody Reads)

A free AI stack is making the rounds right now: five tools, no team, no ad budget. The tools are real. But two of them do not mean what people think free means, and one of them can get your deployments paused. I read the actual terms on all five. Here's the chain, link by link. LINK 1 — DECIDING WHAT TO BUILD Gemini Notebook (Google renamed NotebookLM). Unlike a general chatbot, it answers only from the sources you give it, and cites every claim back to the exact source. Free plan is roughly 50 sources per notebook and about 100 notebooks. LINK 2 — ATTENTION Apify. A scraping platform that pulls back the posts already winning on a topic, with the numbers attached. Free plan is $5 of platform credits per month, no rollover, expires at the end of every cycle. LINK 3 — CONVERSION Astro for the landing page. MIT licensed, properly open source, and it ships almost no JavaScript. LINK 4 — SUPPORT n8n. Reads your own help docs, drafts the answer, and escalates to you with the full history when a customer says it's still broken. LINK 5 — YOUR UNDO BUTTON GitHub. Free plan gives you unlimited public and private repos and 2,000 Actions minutes a month. Not just for code: your site, your docs, your automations, your prompt library. THE TWO LANDMINES 1) Vercel's Hobby plan is free, but their fair use policy restricts it to non-commercial, personal use. If the site sells anything, you're on the wrong plan and deployments can be paused. Pro is $20 a month. 2) n8n is not technically open source. It's fair-code under their Sustainable Use License. Self-host it free forever, run your whole business on it. You just can't repackage and resell it as your own service. YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK Pick the one link in that chain that is genuinely slow. Just one. Install one tool. Ship it before Friday. Don't go collect all five. Subscribe for more AI and automation from 15+ years of building this stuff for real.