Decision skill · FreeProduct Loop

Does your v1 actually need AI?

Does your first version actually need AI — and if so, where, how much, and at what monthly cost?

Version 1.0 · Plain text · No email required · CC BY-SA 4.0

What this skill does

Hand this file to Claude or ChatGPT. The assistant interviews you, one question at a time, through this decision's determining questions — on your specifics. It then applies the decision rules to your answers and gives you the recommendation plainly, with the conditions under which it would change.

The decision it executes

Does your v1 actually need AI? →

How to tell an AI product from a product with an AI feature from plain software wearing an AI costume — and how model choice turns into a monthly bill you can predict.

The guide is the canonical version: determining questions, paths with dated costs, what I'd do, and limits. It belongs to The Product Loop.

Escalation clause

An honest tool knows its edges.

This decision stops being self-serve — and needs a human with scars in the room — when:

The AI output feeds a regulated decision — medical, lending, hiring, insurance. The design needs a compliance framework from someone who knows that regime; this walkthrough cannot provide it.
The model IS the moat — the pitch is that their model does something others cannot. That needs specialist evaluation (data strategy, evaluation pipelines, possibly training), not this framework.
Hard real-time or on-device constraints — sub-100ms responses, offline operation, on-device inference. The architecture is dictated by the constraint and the API cost math above does not transfer.

When this skill revises

Optional. The download never depends on it.

Skill revisions and cost updates are announced in the newsletter.