1. Introduction
A few months ago, we started building Propoza, a tool that generates business proposals with AI for Brazilian freelancers and small business owners.
The problem was practical: freelancers spend hours crafting proposals in Canva or Word, delivering generic documents that don't protect the project scope. The tool needed to be simple — the user describes the service, the AI structures a complete proposal with scope, timeline, and payment terms.
The technical challenge: how do you run a freemium SaaS for Brazilian freelancers without blowing your budget before you have revenue?
A lean SaaS or micro SaaS typically costs between $5 and $20 per month before your first paying customer — just for server, managed database, and CDN. For a validation-phase product, that's burned money.
