I wanted to own my AI automations instead of paying monthly SaaS fees—so I built a free, self-hosted stack

Every morning, I spent 20 minutes checking AI news, live model pricing, and new releases across Hacker News, Techmeme, and Reddit.

It was repetitive, tedious, and hard to track.

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.

I built a completely free, self-hosted AI automation stack.

The Stack

The stack runs 24/7 on an always-free Oracle Cloud VPS. It coordinates:

1. A Python research engine that scrapes news sources.
2. OpenRouter free model routing to generate structured summaries.
3. A Notion database tracking 18 properties.
4. Instant Slack alerts containing the daily briefing highlights.

In this guide, I'll walk you through how you can own your automation stack too...

Repo Links:

• Dev.to: https://github.com/mdsohail99/free-vps-n8n-pipeline?ref=devto

Comments

[shiwei xie]

TextStow could be useful for this workflow — clipboard history + reusable favorites + prompt templates + cleanup for JSON/PDF/URLs. Local-first, free: textstow.com

[mdsohail99]

Oh nice, thanks for sharing this! I'm running on Windows so I can't test it myself since it's Mac-only, but a local-first clipboard manager fits the self-hosted vibe perfectly. Definitely a cool tool for the Mac devs reading this to check out.