I bootstrapped an API business on a single RTX 3060, from literally zero budget

Two weeks ago I had zero dollars, one gaming PC with an RTX 3060 Ti, and a stubborn idea: what if the cost of running a small, useful LLM-backed API could be close to zero, if you just... hosted the model yourself?

Here's what I shipped, and the specific things that broke along the way — because the failures were more instructive than the plan.

The idea

A small API that turns plain English into working code artifacts:

/v1/regex — "validate a Brazilian CEP" → a working regex, an explanation, and match/no-match examples

I bootstrapped an API business on a single RTX 3060, from literally zero budget

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I tried to build a SaaS. I'm shipping tiny libraries instead.