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Am I getting ripped off? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 days ago by appauled@sh.itjust.works to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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Hi everyone! I've got a question about some guys at work who are pitching that we need a server. This is mostly a sanity check, but I'm pretty sure they're full of shit

The law firm I work for uses a CRM that doesn't have an open API. This is important. You can access a daily updated copy of your data from an S3 bucket with an API, but it's essentially read-only for that reason.

They said they want to set up a server for the firm for " automation" using n8n. We can't use n8n because it doesn't have a native integration with our CRM. They also set up Dropbox for the firm (prior to my time starting) and the firm pays for OneDrive with Microsoft suite already...

Then they said they want local ai for automation so they'll

"Just put a 5070ti in there" For an ai agent for the entire 15-20 person firm. They also never specified what said ai would do. I also think it's completely not viable

Then they said all 3 locations can just use tailscale to access the server simultaneously. All of these people minus me and one other are completely non-technical. I help them restart Excel once a week non-technical.

I cannot possibly think of a viable use case for what they're describing. Am I cinical or are they just looking to make some cash off whatever project they don't know anything about?

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[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This does seem tenuous, yes.

If they want to experiment with AI a bit and try to find a use-case for it, a bit of R&D every now and then can be good, right? But the way to do that would be to temporarily rent a VPS with a GPU. From AWS or whatever. That way when/if it looks good they'll know roughly what size hardware to buy (way more than a 5070 ti most likely). Also if it doesn't pan out all you've lost is a couple of hundred $ on one month's rental and you can close it down and move on.

Or just use the OpenAI API, that way you don't need to figure out how to run a model at all and can just concentrate on the data integration to see if that's viable.

[–] appauled@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

That's what I was thinking too, I'm pretty sure just using the API for those models or a VM with a GPU like you said would be the only viable options