Don't pay for an AI agent

Don't pay a developer thousands to build your first AI agent. There's a free tool where you build one yourself by dragging pieces around a screen.

It's called Dify, and it's open source.

An agent is AI that does a whole job on its own. You hand it the work once and it gets on with it, instead of you typing instructions all day.

In Dify you drag each step of the job into place and join them up, with no code anywhere. You feed it your own documents, the price list and terms you actually use, and it answers from those instead of guessing. When a customer asks the price of a rush job, it quotes your actual rate, because it has read your actual price list.

It comes with over fifty built-in tools, so it can search the web, create images and do sums. It connects to more than a hundred AI models, including Claude and GPT, so you're never locked into one. When your agent is ready, it goes on your website as a chatbot your customers can use.

The catch is that the free version runs on your own server, and installing it is genuinely technical. If that's a step too far, the hosted version runs in the browser, and the free tier is enough to build your first agent and try it out.

Two years ago this was a development project with a development invoice. Now the only real work is choosing which job to hand over.

Pick the one question your customers ask every week, and make answering it your first agent.