Building AI Apps on a Budget: How I Pushed Supabase’s Free Tier Into a Production AI System

When you start building AI into a real product, the model is usually the easiest part. I learned this while building a multi-agent AI system into a B2B SaaS operations tool, the kind of platform that manages schedules, billing records, client accounts, and service history across a relational schema that had grown to >20 tables. The goal was simple on paper: let users query and act on their operational data using plain language, without navigating five different pages to do it. What followed was six months of learning that AI infrastructure is mostly just infrastructure.