AI !== scalable solutions

 🛠️ AI is the new, better solution right?

Not always for scalable solutions in web development.

I needed an automated way to extract Energy Performance Certification (EPC) scores from EPC charts for my Chrome Extension to work out a property's ongoing costs.

It would be easy to think send this to Amazon Textract or even just ChatGPT, it would accurately extract the information and then we can write some logic to get the scores. With Amazon, you even get a generous free tier for 1 thousand pages per month for free for 3 months.

Only issue is, this is a service on the free version of the model. If there were 10,000 users looking at 100 properties every month, that's going to cost thousands per month for free users that aren't paying.

Not a scalable solution where my aim is to only incur costs when the user pays via serverless architecture.

I ended up using terrasect.js to extract text information from PDFs and actually HTML Canvas for images to automate extracting the score from the image.

A zero cost solution 🎉

Have you faced a similar challenge?

BuildInPublic AWS WebDevelopment FullStack Frontend

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building: Vesta Property Checker #1

I've decided to start building in public, sharing what I'm doing and the lessons I've learned with others. After being previously burned by buying property where I wasn't given the complete information on the property, I came up with the idea of Vesta Property Checker.  Initially, it was a chrome extension with a feature-by-feature checklist that evaluates property listings for completeness and highlights missing critical information via a freeium model. In doing so, it enhances transparency and assists buyers in making more informed decisions about the biggest risk purchase of their lives. It then had the option to automate a message to the buying agent asking about all the missing information from the agent. As well as what was in the listing, I started build my own APIs,  pulling information like crime data for the local area and creating a 'crime score' based on the general population of the area.  I find other paid APIs that I could utilise to pull in more ...
Read more

🛠️ Don't forget to PEE on your data

I recently shared a rough MVP with some potential users for a Chrome Extension I’m building that helps property buyers make smarter decisions. The first version was a checklist — scraping and augmenting listing data, highlighting what was missing, and automating questions for estate agents. The feedback? While helpful, it was overwhelming. Users wanted help understanding the data, not just being told what they need to message the agent about. They needed clarity and confidence — not just more info. It reminded me of being 15 in school being taught how to write essays: PEE – Point, Evidence, Explanation. I was showing the Point and the Evidence… but missed the Explanation (analysis). It turns out, users first need analysis: “What does this mean for me?” Only after that do they want the evidence and deep dive on to each checklist item. So now, I’m building a dashboard to help users see what’s important at a glance — and then dig in if they want to. How do you approach synthesising data i...
Read more