Building a private AI agent for under $20/month: old laptop plus DeepSeek via OpenRouter
lawandd · reddit · 2026-10-24
A Reddit user is looking for the cheapest way to get an AI agent accessible from an iPhone: it must read large PDFs (20MB+), run code, generate documents, and connect to tools via MCP (a personal database, Canva). Usage is only a few important tasks per week, and he wants to stay under $20/month since ChatGPT, Claude, and Kimi subscriptions each cost about that much.
His available hardware is an old always-on laptop (2 cores, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD); he plans to call APIs rather than run models locally. The setup under consideration: Hermes Agent on the laptop, backed by cheap models like DeepSeek or Qwen via OpenRouter, reachable from his phone through Telegram or Matrix. He also asks how reliable cheap models are for multi-step tool use and what security precautions matter for an agent that can run code and touch his database.
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