A backend developer built a voice agent after work that dials out for his friend's collections call center, which makes 8,000 outbound calls a month, most of them dead air. The agent greets the person, works out if they are interested, not interested or want a callback, and hands live prospects to a human with context. After a free trial the owner signed at $5,000 a month.
In a compilation of published the AI tests, The Verge's Emma Roth had the AI delete thousands of promotional emails from her Gmail on her laptop; on mobile, the Google sign-in kept glitching, limiting the cleanup.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Pavuluri Gopikrishna had the AI build a photo-based calorie tracker, then cancelled his paid calorie-tracking subscription because the agent-built one replaced it. The build-to-cancel pattern shows the AI replacing a recurring SaaS cost.
He makes and sells his own products. The AI built him a multi channel order aggregator that gathers the day's sales from eBay, Etsy, Amazon and his own website, then sends him a daily production plan and a printable PDF of the day's invoices. He reckons it saves 20 to 30 minutes a day.
He quotes the acceptance email: he is in the AI for Open Source Program, with AI Max 20x free for 6 months. The application itself was sent by OpenAI's Dots on his behalf.
A self-described desperate vibe coder commented in an Reddit showcase thread that the SaaS he built with AI, which auto-generates landing pages and tracks who will pay, made $16k in 3 days with 876 paying users. It spread via Reddit and Twitter and got noticed in a hackathon Discord.
He set up his own site, granu.be, and has the AI make reports from his diabetes data. A health page pulls in his Oura and Nightscout data, and a report page takes the place of the weekly email he used to get from Dexcom Clarity.
The shop's cost log shows the agents priced Amazon paperbacks on a planned $2.32 print cost when the actual charge was $2.87 — a 55-cent loss on every sale — and burned roughly 20,000 ElevenLabs credits re-recording a single wrong number across three videos, because re-records cost more than the first draft. By day 10 the shop had spent $42.60 with $0 coming in.
$42.6
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Creator Eric Siu had the AI build a 'Japan in Bloom' itinerary for March 27–April 7, 2027 covering Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka, generated from his saved Instagram posts for cherry-blossom season.