I'm a solo business owner who couldn't afford employees. A $20-a-month AI subscription became my team.

• Christina Puder went from casual AI user to building her website and running her business with it.
• She cut a client service task from one hour to one minute using AI automation.
• This article is part of "The AI-Powered Solopreneur," a series exploring how solo business owners use AI to drive growth.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Christina Puder, a 35-year-old solo founder based in Madrid. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I took my side hustle full-time, I needed a website and accidentally fell into the world of building with AI.

After trying an old website builder and failing, I hired a designer and an engineer part-time to do it. They were a bit slow, so while I was waiting, I tried using a suggested AI tool to build my website.

I don't have funding or a technical background, so I made a free account with Lovable, an AI coding assistant. I started adding simple information about the website design, and all of a sudden, the AI platform built the entire landing page. That was my gateway into all the things AI can do.

Sometimes using AI feels like I'm working with the dumbest person I've ever met, but the word "constraint" very rarely enters my mind when I think about how AI is enabling me to run my business.

I didn't set out to build an AI-powered business — I just wanted to move fast without hiring

For about the last 10 years, I've been doing career coaching for product managers on the side of my full-time job. I went from zero clients to consistently having a full plate. In 2025, I decided to coach full-time.

I knew I wanted to be bootstrapped, and hiring full-time employees was way too expensive. Part-time isn't ideal either because that's somebody who might not fully understand my business needs; it's not their main focus.

Before building my website, I was a casual AI user. I would go to ChatGPT for help with ideas, writing, and research. I don't have a background in tech, and because of that, I initially didn't think of AI as an enabler for my business. After building my website, I discovered how useful AI could be for both my webpage and the internal system of my business.

Five free credits a day helped me build my website to scale my company

When I tried building my website before using AI, I probably put in 30 or 40 hours, and it turned out so ugly and clunky. Then I started testing Loveable using five free credits a day. After seeing how fast the AI tool worked and how good it looked, I knew I'd be back the next day to keep building.

When I first started using Lovable, I think the credits were correlated to the number of messages I sent. I discovered a hack after I sent a message with a single easy change request, and it cost me a credit. In the next message, I put six requests, and it did all six changes and only took one credit again.

I think they've discovered that loophole. Now, credit usage seems more closely tied to the amount of power a request consumes. There are times I'm building, and I'm surprised because I won't realize I'm making such an expensive request.

I'm not sure how many credits it took to build my whole website. It's definitely more than five, but someone could build a whole landing page with five credits. They could ask the AI tool to make a basic website with three sections and brand colors, and I think it would honestly only take two and a half credits.

I still use my 5 free credits almost every day, even though I have a paid subscription

I switched to a paid account, and now I pay $20 a month for my subscription, which I don't think is that expensive. I get 100 credits a month, plus my five free credits every day that don't roll over.

I've started to think of my AI tools as workers. I want to make sure I use them to their full capacity, which is why I always try to use the credits that don't roll over. It's the same as if I hired someone full-time: I'd want them to deliver high output every day.

If it's been a while since I've given my website backend some love, I'll write a prompt asking which areas of the code would most benefit from a refactor, and ask it to rank them. Then, based on how many of my five credits I have left, I'll tell it which areas to fix.

AI helped me cut down the time for a task from one hour to one minute

One service I offer is finding and applying to jobs for clients. Each client has very specific criteria for the kinds of jobs they want, and I would manually search for jobs that fit those criteria for each client.

It used to take me around 60 minutes a day per client just to manually find the right jobs to apply for. I built AI-driven automations that reduced search time to one minute. Getting 60 minutes a day back for each of my clients has been a massive scale unlock.

I really didn't think it was possible.

Sometimes I have to go back to a human engineer, but I'm still impressed with AI

Every once in a while, things break, or I hit bugs. There have been times when I'm building something, and I spend 40 credits trying to fix it. After a while, I'll ask the AI to completely remove the feature we're working on because we've hit a bug. I'll tell them that instead of continuing to try to dig our way out, we're just going to start from scratch.

There was once an issue with some logos on my website. I tried and tried to prompt it to make them all look the same size together, but it wouldn't do it. I eventually went back to my part-time engineer and asked them to fix it.

Every once in a while, I go back to that engineer and just pay him to fix one or two specific things that I can't get done.

Do you have a story to share about running an AI-powered business? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.