Freelancer → agency owner → SaaS founder.

Now running Botster.io → an all-in-one tool that helps digital businesses extract, monitor, and weaponize web data.

Posting SaaS learnings, automation tricks, technical deep dives.

If you’re building anything online - you’ll probably find something useful here.

If you're looking to automate your business - text me, DMs are open.

Denis Grammakov

I just cancelled another $1,000/year Firecrawl subscription.

Moved all my scraping in-house. 

Not because Firecrawl is bad (it's great)

But because writing scrapers that update themselves with AI is now stupidly easy.

I describe the case.
Claude drafts the plan.
Codex pressure-tests edge cases.
Deploy.

That’s it.

In about an hour of coding I replaced 5 scrapers that were eating the entire subscription doing millions of requests.

Now they’re running on a single VPS, chewing through cheap proxies.

Clean. Controlled. Profitable.

And the best part?

The scraper is 100% mine.

No "buy more credits". Just code.

I’ll keep a couple $19/mo hobby plans around, they’re great when you need to blast 1,000 random URLs and extract some universal fields fast.

But all the low-hanging fruit WILL be trimmed.

$1,000/year tools starting to look very optional.

Denis Gramm

Solofounder @ Botster & StayAPI // B2B Web Scraping & Workflow Automation // I blog about my journey and findings

Legacy SEO tools are starting to look like a joke.

What am I paying $150/month for exactly?

Almost all my traffic comes from Search + AI.

Yet every month I open Ahrefs and it confidently shows me a big fat NOTHING 

except for a list of spam links, of course 

Thanks 🙏 

All of that while the site is growing and getting traffic.

Feels like a relic from the “10 blue links” era of Google.

No wonder new SEO / GEO SaaS startups are wiping the floor with these guys and raising funding left and right.

While the old dashboards are still pretending it’s 2016.

When they go extinct nobody will miss them

Cancelled my Cursor subscription.

Not using it anymore.

I rarely even look at the code - and even more rarely fix it myself.

When I do, VSCode is still perfectly fine.

Models are accessible directly and they work much better.

So I mostly live in Warp with a bunch of terminal windows open.

Plenty of free or better alternatives anyway:
Conductor, AutoClaude, and of course native apps.

AI gave us so many free and great solutions, there's no point in paying extra.

OpenClaw will bankrupt you if you're not careful.

I woke up to a cup of coffee and 15 notifications:

Rate limit reached
Switching to backup
Backup funds depleted
Retrying
Retrying
Retrying

Bruh.

AI agents are basically unsupervised interns with YOUR credit card.

While you sleep your “AI automation that replaced the entire marketing department” is speedrunning your bank balance.

Good thing I set hard limits.

Otherwise OpenClaw would’ve eaten my profit, my runway, and probably my house.

If you’re running AI agents, tattoo this on your forehead:

1. HARD CAPS
No soft warnings. No emails. Just kill the api key until its reviewed. 

2. LLM LAST. NOT FIRST.
If a script can do it for $0.002,
and you’re paying $0.12 for an LLM call -
it's time to rethink things. 

3. RETRY LIMITS
Three retries max.
After that fail, log and review.
“maybe next call will fix it” optimism is not going to work. 

Your agent is a toddler with a handgrenade. Act accordingly.

I had a few ideas for the updated StayAPI homepage.

Only one problem: 

I know NOTHING about animation.

(My top achievement is adding a snowflake script to my website in 2002)

So I described my ideas to Claude.

10 minutes and a few iterations later - done.

I suggested using some libraries but Claude said 'nah' and rawdogged it with pure vanilla JS + CSS keyframes.

EXACTLY how I imagined it!

How long would it take to find a freelancer for this?
How long would it take them to code this? 
How much would it cost?

Rhetorical questions.

After 90 days I’m still using OpenClaw.

Here are 4 things it actually does for me daily.

1 - Lead generation assistance

I built a pipeline on top of the Apollo API.

Now I can search, filter, enrich and deduplicate leads for StayAPI with a few Telegram prompts.

They get formatted and pushed straight into my Instantly campaigns.

2 - CRM connectivity

OpenClaw manages my Zoho Bigin CRM.

Once I get a new lead, OpenClaw picks it up, creates the person and company profiles in Bigin, and adds the proper deal card into the pipeline.

It then watches the cards, adds details as deals move through stages and makes sure they don’t go stale.

CRM stays the source of truth without me touching it.

3 - Project management autopilot

It monitors multiple Trello boards, watching over the development team and sending me updates and end-of-day summaries.

I can see which tasks moved and which ones have been stagnant longer than they should.

OpenClaw even pings devs by leaving comments and cross-manages boards across different languages (!!).

4 - Dev operations

It’s connected to my GitHub as a collaborator and helps me add or edit issues through voice or text messages via Telegram.

So bugs and feature requests go from
chat → GitHub → backlog

without friction.

At any point in time I can ask it any question about any codebase of mine and it will respond with a text or a voice message.

___

SO

Is it overhyped?

Not for me.
The quality and speed of my work went up.

Is it for everyone?

Definitely not.

Tokens get randomly spent.
Context gets lost.
App connections break.
There are plenty of bugs.

Is it worth trying?

You bet.

Is it true a 1000 agents can run your business? And do you need to buy a Mac mini?
No and no.

taplio

The Battle

Denis Grammakov

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