Today a friend who’s also a former entrepreneur showed me something cool. He’s a technologist and loves to tinker. We talked about AI agents and how much running them continuously via Claude will cost, and he showed me his setup. He bought inexpensive (maybe $100) Raspberry Pi computers and set them up in his house on his local network. He installed the Claude app on them. He has Claude Cowork build software that solves a specific problem for him and then install the software to run locally on a Raspberry Pi.

My friend then uses Raspberry Pi Connect to monitor his agents and access the software that’s running locally on each Raspberry Pi machine. He likes this setup because it doesn’t require continuous work and token usage with Claude. Instead, Claude builds the software and the agent’s job is done. The software runs to do whatever task my friend wants. Because it’s running on a Raspberry Pi at his house, it doesn’t cost him anything to keep the software running 24/7. And he can access the software from anywhere, as long as he has internet access.

I thought this was an interesting setup to get around the increasing costs associated with using Claude and its agents.