The AI agent cost guides say $200 a month. Mine has cost $5.

Description and use

MIGI’s architecture—cron‑scheduled GitHub Actions, free Postgres, multi‑provider routing, and a fallback‑first strategy—kept total spend under $5 for two months, far below published estimates.

Problem

Personal AI agent stacks are estimated to cost $185–$480/month, but a real-world fleet (MIGI) ran for two months with under $5 total spend.

Outcome

MIGI’s architecture—cron‑scheduled GitHub Actions, free Postgres, multi‑provider routing, and a fallback‑first strategy—kept total spend under $5 for two months, far below published estimates.

Workflow

• 1. Define each agent’s goal and list of provider APIs in order of preference.
• 2. Store state in a free Postgres database; results delivered via Telegram/email.
• 3. Schedule each agent as a GitHub Actions workflow triggered by cron (no server).
• 4. On each run, the agent attempts the first provider; if the request fails (rate‑limit or billing error), it retries with the next provider in the list.
• 5. Log each request and response; aggregate logs to detect rate‑limit vs. billing errors by inspecting error codes and message content.
• 6. If a provider key is missing, skip that provider silently to avoid crashes at night.
• 7. Monitor the OpenAI balance; if it hits zero, the agent will continue to run but all calls will fail until the balance is restored.
• 8. Adjust provider order per agent based on median call size and token/request limits to minimize cost.
• 9. Periodically review logs to ensure no provider is unused or misconfigured.
• 10. When a new provider is added, update the routing file and supply the API key via GitHub secrets.

Evidence

MIGI is a fleet of AI agents built by Suman Debnath, running since 8 July 2026 at forty to fifty agent runs a day. It has cost under five dollars in total, against published estimates of $185 to $480 a month for a comparable personal stack, because the paid model is a fallback rather than the default.

Source

Each agent names an ordered list of providers rather than a single model. When one refuses, the call moves down the list. Seven providers appear across the fleet, a paid one leads the work where quality is the entire point, and free tiers carry the routine traffic — which is most of it, because most of what an agent does in a day is unglamorous.

Source

There is no server anywhere in MIGI, no container, and no paid orchestration layer. Each agent is a plain Node process that a cron‑scheduled GitHub Actions workflow wakes up.

Source