How I run 9 free AI tools on a $6 VPS with open-source models (no signup, no paywall)
Every "free" AI tool I tried in the last year eventually hit me with a login wall, a 3-uses-per-day limit, or a "your free trial has ended" modal. So I built my own set and made a rule for it: no accounts, no paywalls, n
Every "free" AI tool I tried in the last year eventually hit me with a login wall, a 3-uses-per-day limit, or a "your free trial has ended" modal. So I built my own set and made a rule for it: no accounts, no paywalls, no data collection. Ever.
The result is 9 browser tools that anyone can use anonymously: new-ai.live/tools
Here's the architecture and the economics of why this can actually stay free.
The stack
- Frontend: Next.js (App Router) on a $6/month DigitalOcean droplet (1 vCPU / 1 GB), process-managed with PM2. Every tool is a client component with a thin API route.
- Models: open-source models — NVIDIA Nemotron and Google Gemma — accessed via OpenRouter's free tier endpoints. This is the trick that makes $0 pricing possible: the models are genuinely free to call, so there's no per-request cost to recover.
- No database for the tools. Nothing you paste is stored. Text goes to the model, the response streams back, done. This isn't just privacy posturing — not having user data is cheaper and simpler than having it.
The tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Summarizer | Up to 20k chars → short / bullets / detailed |
| Humanizer | Makes robotic AI text read naturally (3 tones) |
| Paraphraser | Rewrites while keeping meaning |
| Grammar Fixer | Fix + explain mistakes |
| Hook Generator | 10 openers per topic (Reels/YT/blog/X) |
| Meta Generator | SEO titles + descriptions within length limits |
| Instagram Captions | Caption sets with hashtags |
| YouTube Summarizer | Video → key points |
| Which AI Quiz | Answers "which model should I actually use?" |
Surviving without signups: rate limiting
The obvious objection: "with no accounts, one abuser can burn your quota." The fix is boring and effective — per-user hourly rate limits enforced server-side (e.g. 10 summaries/hour). No CAPTCHA, no fingerprinting, no login. In practice the limit is invisible to real users and fatal to scrapers.
The deeper lesson: most AI tools don't need accounts. Accounts exist to build funnels, not features. If your tool takes text in and gives text out, identity is overhead — for you and the user.
What a 1 GB box can and can't do
-
next buildon 1 GB RAM is the pain point — it needs swap enabled or it OOMs. - Runtime is fine: the tools are I/O-bound (waiting on model APIs), not CPU-bound.
- PM2 restarts + LiteSpeed in front have kept it boring. Boring is the goal.
What I'd do differently
- Start with the rate limiter on day one (I added it after the first traffic spike).
- Put an
og:imageon every tool page before sharing anywhere — link previews with no image get measurably fewer clicks.
Try it / roast it
Everything is live at new-ai.live/tools — no signup, so trying it costs you one click. I'd genuinely like feedback on which tool deserves to become deeper (batch mode? file upload? API?). Comments welcome.
Originally published by Dev.to AI. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.