Solo founder replaces contractors with $20 AI subscription

A Business Insider profile of Madrid-based career coach Christina Puder reads like a feelgood solopreneur story—until you treat it as what it is: a concrete case study in micro-enterprise automation and the new dependency stack it creates.

Puder tells Business Insider she went full-time with her coaching business after years as a side hustle and wanted to stay bootstrapped. Hiring full-time employees was out of reach; even part-time contractors felt slow and misaligned. Her workaround was an AI toolchain: she used ChatGPT for ideation, writing, and research, then discovered Lovable, an “AI coding assistant,” while trying to build a website. With a free account and limited daily credits, she says Lovable generated an entire landing page from prompts—after she had already spent “30 or 40 hours” on a traditional website builder that produced something “ugly and clunky.”

The operational detail that matters is not that AI “helped,” but what it substituted for. Puder describes compressing a client service task from roughly an hour to a minute through AI-driven automation. In small services businesses, that category typically includes intake emails, FAQ replies, scheduling back-and-forth, document generation, and templated follow-ups—work that previously demanded either a human assistant or the founder’s evenings.

Her economics are blunt: she moved from free-tier experimentation to a $20/month subscription, which she frames as “my team,” with a credit-based quota (100 credits a month plus daily free credits). That’s a labor multiplier priced like SaaS, not payroll. This is the interesting part: small actors can scale output without HR bureaucracy, compliance overhead, or the managerial bloat that turns “hiring” into a lifestyle.

But the new “employee” is a platform with terms of service. Puder notes the credit system changed after she found a way to batch multiple requests into a single credit. That’s the automation economy in miniature: you optimize your workflow, then the meter gets recalibrated. Today it’s a pricing tweak; tomorrow it’s a policy change, a model downgrade, or a data-retention rule you didn’t vote for.

There are also real risk categories that don’t show up in the subscription price. Prompt and document leakage is the obvious one: founders paste client details, business plans, and drafts into tools whose training and logging policies are often opaque. Another is silent error: AI-generated code, copy, or “advice” can be wrong in ways that look confident, shifting the cost from production to verification and QA. The final risk is lock-in: once your website, workflows, and internal processes are co-designed with a specific model’s quirks, “switching providers” starts to resemble rewriting your business.

$20/month can indeed replace staff—right up until it replaces your bargaining power.

Source: Business Insider.