Yusel AI is the product-side companion to my Botpress micro-agency work. Instead of pitching chatbots I cannot let strangers try, I built a real Next.js app where a freelancer or sari-sari owner can open a thread, pick a template, and get a draft without signing up for three different APIs first.
The model strategy is honest about cost. Free hosted inference through Groq, OpenRouter :free models, Hugging Face, and optional local Ollama — with paid frontier models hidden until someone actually needs them. Pro billing ships in PHP through Lemon Squeezy, with a single tier and copy that does not pretend unlimited free usage.
June 2026 sprints landed the pieces that make it feel like a product instead of a demo: a Spline 3D hero on the landing page (perf-gated so low-end phones skip WebGL), freelancer/seller chat templates with tabbed picker UI, a cheap-first model lineup on Pro, friendly 429 messages when free providers rate-limit, and middleware that stops auth from blocking static fonts and media.
The niche positioning is deliberate — Filipino sellers writing product captions, freelancers answering client briefs, small teams that code-switch between English and Tagalog mid-sentence. The AI micro-agency handles custom Botpress flows for owners who want a human in the loop. Yusel AI handles the self-serve side.
Still in flight: production deploy, Lemon Squeezy webhook hardening, and enough real-user testing to know whether the free tier economics hold. Either way I now have a shippable AI product in the portfolio, not just test rigs.
