I know a lot of YouTube AI, marketing, social media, and other niche “gurus” are mainly in the upsell business, and fair enough, that’s the grind. Some take it way too far, but that’s not the point.

The real issue is incentives. Platforms, courses, affiliates, and communities are often where the money is made, not the tools themselves. That creates a constant push toward whatever’s new, shiny, and clickable.

What rarely gets mentioned is how much you can already do with open-source tools and local setups. Things like n8n (obviously…) for automation, or running open-source LLMs locally with tools like Ollama or LM Studio, Dia for TTS, let you build and experiment for almost nothing.

No, open source won’t magically give you free video generation at scale. Once you factor in GPU and RAM, you’ll lose interest fast. But for text, automation, and actually learning how things work, local and open source go a long way and probably could allow you to run your project without paid dependencies for the most part.

Sometimes slowing down and going local teaches you more than chasing the next AI feature ever will.