My AI Employee Org Chart (With Real Costs) | Igor Gridel
# My AI Employee Org Chart (With Real Costs)
My monthly payroll is $180. That covers strategy, daily operations, image generation, video prototyping, content publishing across six platforms, cloud storage, and three automated agents that check my business every few hours. No employees. No contractors.
Everyone posts their AI stack. Nobody posts the failure modes.
So here's my actual org chart. Every tool, the real cost, and where it breaks.
## The brain: Claude Code + Obsidian ($100/month)
Claude is the core of everything I do. Not in a motivational sense. In a "my entire business runs through it" sense.
I use Claude Code connected to my Obsidian vault, which holds everything: drafts, voice rules, posting logs, audience research, offer details, decision history. I've built twelve custom skills on top of this. One turns a raw idea into post options. Another processes voice transcripts and routes them to the right place. Another runs my weekly review.
Three automated agents run on timers. One checks my desk every four hours for stale drafts and missed tasks. One gives me a morning briefing. One runs a deep strategy review every Saturday. None of them post anything automatically. They suggest, I decide.
Where it breaks: honestly, not much right now. Anthropic fixed a usage issue last week and I almost never hit the limit on the $100 subscription anymore. The real risk isn't cost. It's dependency. My entire workflow lives inside one company's product.
## The daily workhorse: Clawdbot + MiniMax ($10/month)
For everyday task work, Claude is overkill. Clawdbot running on MiniMax M2.7 handles about 97% of routine tasks at $0.30 per million input tokens. At $10 a month, it's cheap enough that I never think about cost when I use it.
Where it breaks: MiniMax is simple. It's not a reasoning model and it doesn't pretend to be. When the task gets too complex or the context fills up, it just needs a new chat with fresh context. That's it. For $10 a month, I don't expect it to think hard. I expect it to execute reliably on straightforward tasks, and it does.
## The creative department: Freepik Premium+ ($20/month)
This is where the math gets interesting. Freepik Premium+ gives me NanoBanana Pro, which is Google's Gemini 3 Pro Image under a different name, and Kling video models. About $20 a month for both.
In my first month testing it, I generated over 2,000 images and 100 videos. Cost per image: roughly one cent. For comparison, the same volume through the NanoBanana API directly would cost about $270 at their standard rate of $0.134 per image.
For video, the workflow is even better. Kling 2.5 runs unlimited at 720p on Freepik. I prototype everything there first. When a test costs nothing, you try compositions you'd never risk at full price. It works well for camera movement and animation elements. What it can't do is voice or realistic human expressions, so forget about generating scenes where people actually talk or show emotion. When a composition works, I run one final generation on Kling 3.0.
Where it breaks: after about 1,000 fast generations in a month, the queue slows down noticeably. 4K isn't included in the unlimited tier. And out of the 39 image models on the platform, NanoBanana Pro is the reason to subscribe. Most of the others are filler.
## Production: ComfyUI ($0 + your own hardware)
ComfyUI is free and open source. I build custom image generation workflows in it for client work and my own content production.
I built an MCP server with skills and a self-improving system for ComfyUI, so Claude can trigger and refine workflows through natural language instead of me opening a browser window. More on that in a future post.
Where it breaks: ComfyUI has a weekend learning curve before it saves you anything. It's a node-based system, not a prompt box. Nodes get deprecated, dependencies break when models update, and every few weeks something that was working just stops.
Before I built the skills and the self-improving system, researching new workflows meant asking ChatGPT and then re-verifying most of what it told me because it would hallucinate with complete confidence. Claude does the same thing sometimes, but less often. The MCP server and the feedback loop made the real difference. I went from manually checking everything to mostly trusting what the system suggests. That's what actually made ComfyUI usable as a daily production tool, not the node editor itself.
## The second opinion: ChatGPT ($20/month)
I pay for a ChatGPT subscription when I need a different point of view. Claude is my primary, but sometimes you want another model to push back on your thinking or catch something Claude missed.
## The rest of the bench
Perplexity Pro: free for a year. I found a PayPal marketing campaign last year that gave it away. Barely use it now, but it's there when I need quick research without leaving the browser.
pCloud: $30 a month for cloud storage. Not glamorous, but everything I produce needs to live somewhere that isn't my local drive.
## Distribution: Post For Me + Supabase + Vercel ($0)
My website runs on Supabase and Vercel, both on free tiers. Post For Me handles publishing across X, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube.
I built a 650-line integration skill so that publishing a post is one command instead of logging into six platforms separately.
Where it breaks: Post For Me sometimes flags authentication tokens as expired when they still work. The fix is to ignore the warning and post anyway. If it goes through, the token was fine. I've spent more time debugging phantom auth errors from this one tool than from everything else combined.
## The full payroll
If I draw this like a company org chart:
CEO and final decision-maker: me
Head of Strategy: Claude Code + Obsidian ($100/mo)
Operations: 3 scheduled agents (included in Claude)
Second Opinion: ChatGPT ($20/mo)
Daily Execution: Clawdbot + MiniMax ($10/mo)
Creative: Freepik Premium+ ($20/mo)
Production: ComfyUI (free)
Storage: pCloud ($30/mo)
Distribution: Post For Me (free)
Infrastructure: Supabase + Vercel (free)
Research: Perplexity Pro (free, PayPal promo)
Total monthly cost: about $180.
## What the org chart doesn't show
Every one of these tools needs supervision. Claude needs well-written skill prompts or it produces generic garbage. Freepik still needs me inside the interface, doing the work manually. ComfyUI needs me to fix broken nodes every couple of weeks. Post For Me needs me to know when to ignore its own error messages.
The pitch for building with AI is that you replace headcount with software. The reality is that you trade salary for supervision. The tools handle the labor. You handle the judgment. And the judgment part doesn't get cheaper the more tools you add.