Developer Built a 100-User RAG System for ₹0 Using Free APIs and a Laptop
A developer built an AI-powered document query system called Kairos to help participants at a departmental event access company reports without printing hundreds of pages. With zero infrastructure budget, the project relied entirely on free API tiers, using Google Gemini as the primary language model and OpenRouter/Nemotron as a fallback. To handle over 100 simultaneous users without hitting rate limits, the developer created 20 parallel API lanes with PostgreSQL-based concurrency controls to distribute requests across multiple free API keys. The entire backend was hosted locally on a personal laptop and exposed to the internet via ngrok, which the developer half-jokingly referred to as 'production infrastructure.' Additional safeguards such as per-team question quotas, request logging, and an admin dashboard were built in to ensure reliability during the live event.
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