I Built My Own AI Assistant in My Evenings — Free, No Signup, No Credit Card

exadokoai — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:22:37 +0000

I'm Max. For the past year I've been building my own AI assistant — ExadokoAI — in my evenings. It started with a simple annoyance: every AI service I tried hit me with the same wall — "sign up, add a credit card, here's your 3-day trial."

So I built it backwards. You open the site and you can chat right away. No card, no SMS, no phone-number signup.

Guests get 60 requests and 300,000 tokens per day with no signup at all.
Signing up with just an email (still free) raises that to 1,500 requests and 10,000,000 tokens per day.

This week the project got its own domain — exadokoai.cc.cd. It's the first real milestone, and I want to share what the thing does and how I got here.

What it does

Chat. Two model lines: 1.6 (Flash / Basic / Prime) — fast and lively, with a "mood of the day"; 1.7 (Lite / Pro / Pro Max) — heavier tasks, files and images right in the chat.
Image generation. A studio that draws from a text description — no daily cap.
Photo understanding. Send a picture and it explains what's in it, reads text from photos, walks through errors on screenshots.
Developer API. An OpenAI-compatible endpoint with keys like exadoko_live_… — plug it into your own clients.
A Telegram bot — up and running.

Limits, no fine print

	Requests / day	Tokens / day
Guest (no signup)	60	300,000
After email signup (still free)	1,500	10,000,000

Images have no daily limit. Limits reset at 00:00 UTC. Login is an email code with brute-force protection.

Why free?

It's a deliberate bet: first collect real users and honest feedback, then figure out monetization once it's clear what people actually value. Right now the service is cheap to run, and I see no reason to charge for something I can give away. Early-user feedback is worth more to me than revenue.

How I got here

The first version took two evenings. One page, an input, a reply. No history, no settings, ugly layout. But it answered — and the first reply from "your own" service motivates you harder than any tutorial.

Then came personality. If a model answers "like everyone else", nobody will use it. I spent about a month on what's formally called "tone tuning" — really, it's character. That's how the 1.6 and 1.7 lines appeared: the difference has to be audible from the first line, otherwise what's the point of a model picker.

Then came hardening. A free service gets attacked within hours: scripts, code brute-forcing, quota draining. So from day one I built the things you can't demo: brute-force protection, per-minute limits, signed sessions. Boring — but it's exactly what separates a "demo" from a service that doesn't fall over.

Technical bits

First-token gate. If a model accepts a request and goes silent, we cancel the attempt after ~20 seconds and quietly fail over to the next model. No more staring at a spinner.
Key rotation across multiple endpoints, with per-endpoint cooldowns.
Built-in web search. For "what's current" questions — rates, news, prices — the model decides it needs the internet and pulls fresh data itself.
Stack: Next.js 15 + React 19, Neon Postgres.

Being honest about traction

I won't pretend there's a flood of traffic — there isn't. A handful of users so far. That's normal: almost every indie product starts in a void. The domain is my starting line; now begins the boring part — showing it, fixing it, and telling people about it, again and again.

What's next

Memory across conversations, an agent mode, a mobile interface.

Try it: exadokoai.cc.cd

And if you find a bug — tell me. For a project with barely any users and a lot of enthusiasm, that's the best kind of help.

DEV Community: exadokoai