We Run a Bootstrapped AI Startup on Almost Zero Operating Costs

A former co-founder and CTO of a bootstrapped AI ed-tech startup describes how the team covered most product infrastructure through startup programs, credits and free tiers rather than paying for each SaaS service, including Sarvam LLM credits, Deepgram and ElevenLabs speech credits, Cloudflare, PostHog, Sentry, Neon and others. He details the mock-interview STT/TTS loop, concurrency limits across providers, and fallback routing, estimating roughly 235 concurrent interviews on paper with 20% headroom across three STT providers. He concludes that credits are not an architecture, since they expire and limits change, so integrations were kept swappable with fallbacks for critical parts.