Hey everyone! Luis here.

I am a "UX designer who codes", not as good as a developer, but I can manage to build my own stuff - slowly and not too complex, but works. My primary passion is the human side and have been working with UX for about 20 years. I learned to "code" in the old good days of Flash and since then I been exploring several different languages, always to help me build a custom tool to better understand peoples pain points - mainly building mockups/prototypes for digital and physical products, for user tests and explorations.

I ve been testing the 'Free Tier' limits of the 2026 AI landscape. While everyone swears by Claude 3.7 or GPT-5.2, I m trying to find the 'Golden Ratio' for makers on a zero-budget.

My current findings for the Office Bee MVP:

• The Brain: Gemini 3.1 Pro (via AI Studio) seems to have the highest 'Reasoning-per-Dollar' (free) for deep R&D.

• The Frontend: v0 (Free Tier) for shadcn/ui components.

• The Glue: Bolt.new for the initial scaffold.

The Challenge: Most 'free' models hallucinate complex state management in full-stack architectures.