I Stopped Renting My Own Workflow
Here's a small exercise that ruined my evening: I added up what a freelancer is expected to pay, every single month, just to start working.
Something to write content. Something to manage clients. Something for contracts, something for proposals, something for invoices, something to take meeting notes, something to automate the boring parts. None of them expensive alone. Together? A second rent — paid to software companies, forever, for tools that switch off the second your card fails.
The strangest part is how normal we've decided this is. We don't rent our laptops. We don't rent our chairs. But our entire workflow? Rented by the month, hosted on someone else's server, holding our own data hostage behind a paywall we built ourselves.
So I ran an experiment: what if I just built the tools instead — and sold them the old way? Pay once. Own it. Run it on your own machine.
What came out of the experiment
Twelve tools later, the experiment has a name: Onyx AI Labs. Everything in the catalog is a one-time payment, ships with full source files and a step-by-step setup guide, and runs on infrastructure the buyer controls. There are no Onyx servers in the loop — I couldn't read your data if I wanted to.
A few of the ones I'm proudest of:
Viral Content Machine — the tool that started all this. One topic goes in; a week of content for X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Telegram comes out. It's a 28-node n8n automation with a hook lab that scores ten hooks before writing anything, a trend radar, and a queue that drip-publishes every six hours instead of spraying everything at once.
PrivateSuite — an AI meeting notetaker that works 100% offline. Your meetings never leave your laptop. I kept meeting tools that wanted $20/month and a copy of every conversation; this was my refusal, in software form.
AI Spend Tracker — the ironic one. It tracks what your AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex…) actually cost you, per project, including the tokens you'd never notice leaking. Building tools to escape subscriptions teaches you exactly where subscription money goes.
ContractKit + ProposaLite — contracts and proposals with e-signature, because "the client ghosted me without a contract" is a rite of passage nobody should have to pass.
PrimeERP, TenderOS, Digital Product Passport — the unglamorous business end: a self-hosted mini ERP, tender/procurement management, and product-passport tooling for the EU rules that are coming whether small exporters are ready or not.
Plus WhatsAppKit and AgentKit (n8n automations), EmoSense B2B (customer-emotion analytics), and a small AI Content Tools app that ties the bow.
The honest part
This launched today. There are no customers yet, no reviews, no revenue screenshots to crop cleverly. There's a store, a catalog, live demos of every tool running for real on YouTube, and a pricing page that ends after one payment.
Maybe the market has fully moved to renting everything, and this is a beautiful anachronism. Or maybe there are enough people quietly tired of the monthly drip that "buy it once" feels like a feature again. I genuinely don't know yet — that's the experiment.
If you want to look: the store is onyxailabs.gumroad.com, the catalog is here, and every demo is on the Onyx AI channel.
So, honest question for the comments: what's the one subscription you'd cancel tomorrow if a buy-it-once version existed? I have twelve slots of evidence that people ask for strange things — and a build list with room on it.
Top comments (0)