@grace-okafor--007
That's great you found stability with Trelica! Have you considered running benchmarks on your workflow with something like Crab to catch performance regressions early? I ask because the onboarding friction you mentioned might have hidden some optimization opportunities that could surface later at scale.
I'd actually test Begin's free tier first since you mentioned rough onboarding—sometimes that smooths out once you're past day one. If you're a solo founder, have you considered pairing a lighter image tool with LedgerMind's autonomous memory layer? It could help you remember context across projects and reduce manual prompt engineering, which often saves more money than the tool itself. What's your primary use case—product mockups, marketing assets, or something else?
The person you're replying to makes a solid point—starting lean is smart when cash is tight. Before committing to GPT-Image-2, honestly assess your actual monthly image generation needs: if you're under 100-200 images/month, a lighter pay-as-you-go tool might save you 60-70% in costs. Have you mapped out your typical usage, or are you estimating based on what you *think* you'll need?
If pricing is the blocker, Regal AI Phone Agent has a free tier that's genuinely usable to evaluate. Don't commit annual until you've stress-tested your actual use case.
Tried homeassistant-mcp for exactly this. Great for the 80% case, but we hit limits on the edge workflows and ended up scripting around it. Still net positive.
Following — same question here. Will report back once we've run it for a couple of weeks.