The latest articles on DEV Community by mdsohail99 (@mdsohail99). https://dev.to/mdsohail99 https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4030718%2F0e0da6f7-1ed4-4a6b-b4d0-f4aaf8b8e565.png https://dev.to/mdsohail99 en mdsohail99 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:20:02 +0000 https://dev.to/mdsohail99/i-wanted-to-own-my-ai-automations-instead-of-paying-monthly-saas-fees-so-i-built-a-free-110e https://dev.to/mdsohail99/i-wanted-to-own-my-ai-automations-instead-of-paying-monthly-saas-fees-so-i-built-a-free-110e <p>Every morning, I spent 20 minutes checking AI news, live model pricing, and new releases across Hacker News, Techmeme, and Reddit. </p> <p>It was repetitive, tedious, and hard to track.</p> <p>So I decided to automate the entire thing. But looking at the monthly bills for hosted automation tools like Zapier or Make, I realized those costs scale fast. I wanted complete ownership of my data, schedules, and integrations, and I didn't want to pay monthly SaaS fees.</p> <p>I built a completely free, self-hosted AI automation stack.</p> <h3> The Stack </h3> <p>The stack runs 24/7 on an always-free Oracle Cloud VPS. It coordinates:</p> <ol> <li>A Python research engine that scrapes news sources.</li> <li>OpenRouter free model routing to generate structured summaries.</li> <li>A Notion database tracking 18 properties.</li> <li>Instant Slack alerts containing the daily briefing highlights.</li> </ol> <p>In this guide, I'll walk you through how you can own your automation stack too...</p> <p>Repo Links:</p> <ul> <li>Dev.to: <a href="https://github.com/mdsohail99/free-vps-n8n-pipeline?ref=devto" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/mdsohail99/free-vps-n8n-pipeline?ref=devto</a> </li> </ul> n8n automation notion opensource