Build your own AI employee for one niche with a free, open-source stack
An AI worker with its own computer that answers emails, sends invoices and books appointments for one kind of business while the office sleeps.
Meta bought Manus, an AI employee with its own computer, for about $2 billion after it reached roughly $100M a year selling to small businesses.
The stack
- Claude ↗Thinks and plans each taskPaid API
- OpenClaw ↗The open-source agent that carries out the tasks on a computerMIT
- Lightpanda ↗A fast headless browser the agent uses to work on the webAGPL-3.0
How to build it
- 1Pick one niche and the five tasks its front office repeats every day.
- 2Give OpenClaw its own browser with Lightpanda and the logins it needs.
- 3Let Claude plan each task and check the result before anything is sent.
- 4Keep a human approval step for payments and anything a customer sees for the first time.
- 5Charge a flat monthly fee per office.
$99 a month from 300 offices is $29,700 a month.
- Dental and medical offices
- Real estate agencies
- Accountants
- Salons and spas
- Home services
- AI image generator API →
- Qwen-Imagefree
- Claudepaid
- A rented cloud GPUpaid
- Private ChatGPT for companies →
- LibreChatfree
- Claudepaid
- MCP connectorsfree
- AI receptionist →
- Chatterboxfree
- Whisperfree
- LiveKitfree
- Claudepaid
Common
questions.
Straight answers. If yours isn't here, ask on a 20-minute call.
What is this list?+
Every week our reels break down an AI product a real company is making money with, and the free, open-source stack you could build your own version on. This page keeps all of them in one place, newest first, with the tools, the licences, the money maths and the reel.
Is the stack really free?+
The software is. Every tool listed is open source or fair-code, and the licence is shown next to it so you can check commercial use. You still pay for hosting, GPUs and the AI model's API, which for most of these products is a few hundred dollars a month at launch.
Which licences allow commercial use?+
MIT and Apache 2.0 allow commercial use with attribution. AGPL-3.0 does too, but if you change the code and offer it as a service you must publish your changes. Fair-code licences such as n8n's Sustainable Use License allow internal and client use but restrict reselling the tool itself, so read them before you build on them.
Can Axionry build one of these for me?+
Yes. We build AI products on open-source stacks with $0 upfront: each checkpoint is invoiced only after you have seen it working. Book a 20-minute call and bring the niche you want to sell to.
Want your own AI employee for one niche built for your niche?
Twenty minutes, straight to the engineer. No sales rep, no deck.