What I’ve built

Each case study follows the same structure: the problem, the design, the numbers, and what went wrong and what I changed. The last section is the one I would read first.

The infrastructure underneath

Everything above runs on infrastructure I operate myself: four virtual servers running Docker services, including a reverse proxy, a self-hosted mail server for four domains, uptime monitoring across every host, and a gateway that routes every model call under a per-agent key. Telemetry captures every API call, so I can go back over any answer, see what it cost, and make the pipelines cheaper and more accurate month over month.

Running these services myself is not frugality; it is the design. Self-hosting makes the security surface mine to harden and mine to red-team. Per-agent keys and call-level telemetry make every action auditable. And putting a gateway between the agents and the models makes scaling a configuration change, not a rewrite.