How I use LLMs to build projects pretty much for free

How I leverage Gemini Pro, Cloudflare, and OpenCode to ship personal apps without paying tons of infrastructure costs.

I wanted something that was effectively free, but still reliable enough for me to use regularly.

The Solution: The “Free Stack”

I’ve moved almost entirely to a setup that costs me ₹0 to build and run.

1. The Orchestrator: OpenCode

This is the biggest unlock for developers right now. You could pay for Claude Pro plan, $20/month is not a lot, but the limits are annoying. However, OpenCode with a Gemini Pro subscription doesn’t hit any limits, unless you use multi-agent orchestration.

I have honestly not found a big difference between Claude 4.7 Sonnet and Gemini 3 Pro. Not sure if Claude 4.5 Opus is significantly better though.

The massive context window is a god-send though. I am effectively able to use the session for 10x longer with Gemini 3 Pro.

Also, the oh-my-opencode plugin makes it super easy to use multiple agents with MCPs. OpenCode by itself is great as well though.

2. The Brain: Gemini Pro

I recharged my old Jio number to get access to Gemini Pro for 18 months. Bonus: I was able to stop paying INR 210/month for the 200 GB Google Drive storage. I know this is not gonna last for long, but hey, make hay when the sun shines. :)

3. The Metal: Cloudflare Workers & D1

This was the biggest pain point earlier. Heroku/Vercel/Render/Supabase technically works. However, I quite like using wrangler cli to deploy projects. wrangler cli also allows you to create databases for persistent data storage. The reason why CLI (command line interface) is essential, is because OpenCode can use it autonomously.

The Process

1. Planning: Use Gemini in web to plan the project outputting a detailed spec.md file including deployment strategy.
2. Set up: Create a folder inside my projects folder and paste the spec.md file.
3. Build in OpenCode: I prompt OpenCode - “Familiarize yourself and start building.”
4. Deployment: It runs npx wrangler d1 execute to set up the DB and npx wrangler deploy to ship it.

I just watch the terminal as it builds, tests, and deploys. I do monitor it from time to time to see the progress.

If I calculate the ROI for my efforts, replacing just 1 SAAS was enough to pay for the months I paid for Claude Pro. We replaced Bitly btw, we were on the $35/month tier. Bonus: I bought a new cheap-ish domain, so our links look better than vanilla bit.ly (I know bit.ly allows you to do this too, I just never got around to it).

Another thing I love is rapid prototyping. My tech team might or might not agree, but I do know that me building things quickly inspires them to move faster too.

Also, I was finally able to build a more extensive homelab (beyond just a Plex server). I pay for everything - I just hate the streaming platform based movie/show selection process. I like being more intentional with how I spend my time. Also, for a while, I had a problem with YouTube.