Software development IS NOT CHEAP! You cannot build scalable AI systems for free.

I get it, AI has made it easier to build software, but it’s not as if you can magically do months worth of coding in days or even weeks. Sales reps and business owners have VERY UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS!

Here’s the pattern I’ve discovered:

There are a bunch of creators who have hyped people up, saying you do not need to have coding knowledge to build AI systems. Is it true? No.

Unless your job is to build small demos/MVPs or content on AI.

You might be able to sell your “product” by showing your leads the automation you built on n8n but when it’s time to deploy it into the real world, it’ll fail on day 1.

Here’s a recent case study from one of my leads:

They needed a WhatsApp reservation and admin system for a network of ~9000 restaurants.

So they did what most people feel is the logical solution, hire developers.

The developers that they had, built a WhatsApp bot using n8n. They showed it to the client, it worked fine. Because obviously it’s a simple chatbot so you can’t really do much with it except talk.

Can you jailbreak it? Piece of cake.

Does it have any logical awareness? No.

Is it anywhere close to a usable demo? Not at all.

So they start reaching out to people who can actually build the system. That’s where I come into picture.

They tell me, they already have a system built “halfway” and need me to finish it in the next 3 days (that too for free lmfao, I’ll get to this part later).

My CTO sits with their developer and sees the system they had.

Surprise! The system is just an n8n template copy pasted with vibe coding done all over (the guy didn’t even remove the ChatGPT comments in the code).

So I tell them, that this cannot be done within 3 days. Your system is pretty much useless, we’ll have to build everything from scratch. We can give you a small demo in the next 12 days, but that requires a certain upfront payment so that we can start working.

That’s where he paused and told “he’ll talk to his partners”.

Apparently all of their budget was already allocated to marketing, they hired a lot of sales people and could only allocate the budget for “API Token costs”.

So yeah, we’re not going forward with them.

P.S. they would’ve paid us once 4-5 restaurants would’ve found the system useful, then they’d recommend it to the 6th restaurant and this time charge money.

Now here comes the issue: People have learned how to put together different blocks on no code tools and call it a day. But someone who had actual coding knowledge knows that it’s only the start.

Here’s the things which were missing from the WhatsApp n8n automation they had:

1. Edge cases.

Nobody tested how the system would reply if there were unwanted inputs, which is like the 90% of human input. The automation kept talking rubbish when things went out of context.

2. No guard rails.

It was extremely easy to jailbreak the system. Few fishy prompts and it would give away every single internal data to the user.

3. Sky high costs.

The workflow had no structure. The vibecoded schema would have cost about 10-20$ on an average per user. Rest you can calculate how costly the operation would be if they even got 10,000 users :) (Apparently they kept pushing every single thing through LLM and the tokens would’ve kept compounding overtime, not gonna go into details).

4. No GDPR knowledge.

Being a bad developer is one thing, but when it comes to WhatsApp, how come people don’t think about the GDPR rules??? Unless you’re looking for trouble.

5. Overpromises.

AI can do everything! Add unlimited features and make revenue based promises to the clients!

Why is this happening?

Because people are underestimating how hard it is to really create a scalable and usable AI system.

There are thousands of people selling themselves as one man dev team who can apparently build saas level systems on his own that too for free.

Why for free? Because no one hires them, I mean why should they? When your services are pretty much useless.

But when new business owners enter this market, they get a feeling that AI has made software development very easy, cheap and almost free. So they have sky high expectations. Every single guy out there is legit selling his “business changing automation” for free. Is that how software industry works? NO.

These no code tools have only added more to the noise. I see so many people who have made absurd promises to their clients which apparently AI can magically solve. They promise to give a demo + result for free. Then they start building using no code tools, fail miserably, try to find builders, get faced by the fact that even demos need some capital to be built, ultimately they are simply unable to deliver.

Conclusion? AI has not made the market cheap, but more complex. People who do not have good software development knowledge CANNOT build scalable AI systems just because they are good at operating no code tools.

So if you’re a business owner, watch out. It’s hard to find the right people for the job when there’s so much noise.

Pro tip: if someone is providing you something for free, chances are. It was worth the same.

3 comments