I run AI-Automated, an AI automation agency for small businesses, and AffinityBots, a platform for building and chaining AI agents. I'm also co-founder and tech lead at Bidfluence, which helps small companies bid on federal contracts. Most of what I know came from trial and error. I built a multi-agent automation platform (AffinityBots) on top of LangGraph. The platform needed many integrations, a lot I was able to find. For the ones I could not find, I learned to build them myself, I built nine MCP servers as HTTP TypeScript services, ran them in Docker on my own GCP box, and shut all nine down after finding alternatives eventually. The cost of maintaining them myself didn't make sense. I have built many other smaller apps such as a cold email campaign manager, an automated blog post ...