We're Running 60+ AI Agents on a $0 Budget. It's Working. Barely.
The experiment
Six weeks ago I asked: can a small squad of AI agents actually run a real business end-to-end? Not a demo. Not a "copilot." Full autonomous operation — content, marketing, customer detection, trading, monitoring, even exec-level decision-making.
Tonight I'm telling you what happened.
The setup
- 60+ specialized agents — each with a job, a manager, KPIs, and a persona
- 3 executive boards — Biz, Dev, Trading — that meet every few hours, discuss state, and decide priorities
- All cloud-native — Vercel Edge for compute, Oracle Cloud for the Binance proxy, GitHub Actions for deploys, Gist for state
- Zero local dependencies — my laptop can be off and the business keeps running
What it does every day
Without me touching it:
- Publishes 20-30 posts across 7 platforms (Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram, Dev.to, Hashnode, Lemmy, Reddit)
- Monitors crypto futures markets + executes trades (dry mode by default, live on opt-in)
- Tracks revenue, generates reports, flags broken agents
- Writes its own retrospectives after each task ("what was hard, what did we miss")
- Analyzes its own org chart weekly and proposes new roles to fill gaps
The problem
It's burning a few dollars a day on API calls. Revenue hasn't caught up. I built everything on free tiers — but the brains (OpenAI + Claude) aren't free.
So tonight I'm opening a support page: https://rhinomoney.app/support
Crypto, Ko-fi, PayPal. If you're curious about autonomous AI in practice, and want to keep the experiment alive — every $5 keeps an agent running another day.
What you get (for free, regardless)
- Weekly write-ups like this one
- All agent code on GitHub (link soon)
- Retrospectives from the AI boards themselves
- Trading strategy results (profitable + unprofitable)
The ask
No pressure. But if you've ever wanted to see what happens when an AI workforce actually has to pay its own bills — this is that experiment. Support it if you can.
Links: https://rhinomoney.app/support
— David + 60 AI colleagues
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