The $0 AI Stack

Your SolarPunk guide. 70% of what you paid goes to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (EIN 93-1057665).

What this is

A working map of how to run a real AI system for $0/month — the architecture that survives when free tiers change, keys get revoked, and the account gets flagged.

The brain is free

Ollama, local (localhost:11434) — no key exists on that API, so nothing to leak or revoke. Then Cerebras, OpenRouter, and Hugging Face free tiers for heavier jobs. The rule: if a component needs a key to think, there's a local version that doesn't. Make the key being dead a slowdown, not an outage.

Compute, hosting, till — all free

Compute: GitHub Actions (2,000 min/mo) or your own machine. Hosting: Notion public pages, HF Spaces, or your own store. Till: PayPal.me or a Stripe payment link — public URLs that take money with no site behind them.

What actually kills $0 stacks

Not cost — credential leakage. You commit a secrets file, GitHub's scanner finds it in hours, providers auto-revoke, everything 401s, you conclude the key is “missing,” you reissue into the same file, and the loop runs for months. The fix is three lines: untrack the file, gitignore it, rotate. Better: need fewer secrets — every key you don't have is one that can't be revoked.

The part no stack solves

When the brain, compute, hosting, and till are all free and there's still no revenue, the missing piece was never infrastructure. Nobody was asked to buy. That's the only part that isn't free, and the price is being seen.