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.
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