Why I built a tool for myself and accidentally discovered the future of specialized data apps

Last month, I was using Fellou’s AI features when I asked it to “find the cheapest apples near me.” I watched as it seamlessly pulled data from my personal grocery tracking app — a tool I’d built last year because I was tired of overpaying for groceries.

Something clicked in that moment. AI browsers aren’t here to replace SaaS apps. They’re here to add functionality to data-driven SaaS apps.

Deploy smarter: spin up full AI-ready stacks on AWS using Pulumi and open source tools.

A few weeks ago, I hit that familiar wall. I found a cool open-source AI tool on GitHub — self-hosted, well-documented, and actually useful (not just another chat wrapper). I wanted to deploy it in AWS, spin up the backend, give it an LLM to talk to, and maybe hook up some logging and monitoring.

If you’ve used Supabase to spin up a quick weekend project or prototype, you’re not alone. It’s famous for being “the open-source Firebase alternative” — a developer-friendly toolkit with a slick UI, hosted Postgres, and batteries-included features like Auth, Realtime, and instant REST/GraphQL APIs.

But lately, Supabase has been showing up in places that might surprise you: internal tools at Fortune 500s, customer-facing dashboards at fast-scaling startups, even behind AI copilots at serious enterprise orgs.

The open-source automation tool is quietly enabling AI workflows and agent-style assistance at scale. Here’s how it’s earning a spot in serious enterprise stacks.

Let me tell you something that surprised me: a tool I once used to automate small, personal workflows is now powering serious enterprise-level operations.

That tool? n8n.

If you’ve never heard of it, n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform. Think of it like Zapier or Make — but way more flexible, self-hostable, and developer-friendly. And unlike those platforms, it’s starting to show up in places you wouldn’t expect: inside large companies, quietly gluing together their tools, APIs, and now… AI.

Open source isn’t just for weekend coders anymore. Here’s how automation, AI, and DevOps tools are making it enterprise-friendly — and why that matters.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined a Fortune 500 company running production workloads on open source software — let alone betting their future on it.

But here we are.

From automation pipelines to AI tooling, open source has quietly (and steadily) earned its seat at the enterprise table. And not because it’s trendy or cheap — but because it actually works.