Own your tools. Don't rent them.
The most underrated business tool of 2026 is a $4-a-month Linux computer on the internet, an SSH key, and an AI that writes code for you. We teach business owners how to use exactly that — the same way we run our own work.
It costs you nothing to start.
Most learning paths gate something. Most "free trials" are really $20-a-month-after-30-days. We don't operate that way and the on-ramp here doesn't either. You can come to a Lakeville session, read every page on this site, watch AI write code for you, run that code on your own laptop, and ship a working first tool — without spending a dollar.
The only money in this method is optional, and it's small. Here's the honest cost ladder:
Coming to a session.
Free. Coffee included. Bring your laptop. Stay for the conversation. You don't owe us anything.
Reading the method.
Every page on this site is free. The 30-day plan, this page, the session topics — all of it. No newsletter to sign up for first.
AI that writes your code.
Claude.ai, ChatGPT, and others have real free tiers that are enough to learn on. Run prompts in your browser. Read the code AI writes for you. Paste it back. No subscription needed to start.
Running your first tool on your laptop.
You don't need a cloud server until you want to share your tool with the internet. The first dozen prototypes can live entirely on your own machine.
Putting your tool online.
When you're ready to give your tool a real web address that customers can visit — that is when you spin up a $4/month cloud computer. You decide when. Could be week one. Could be never.
If you need real help, we're here.
If you hit something too big for a session — a real integration, sensitive data, a compliance question — Cichocki Advisory engages on its own terms. NDA-first. Never mentioned during sessions. Most owners never need this. The ones who do, get a real engagement, not a sales pitch.
What "owning your tools" actually means in 2026.
There are three pieces. None of them is hard. None of them costs more than your monthly phone bill. Most business owners have never had anyone explain them in plain English — so they end up paying SaaS companies $300/month for a tool they could've built themselves in a weekend.
A cloud computer you own
A small Linux server sitting in a datacenter, on the internet, with its own address. DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode — pick a provider, click a button, you have one in 60 seconds.
SSH — your private door
SSH is the protocol that lets you type commands into that server from your laptop. Set up an SSH key once (think: a much stronger password) and your laptop talks to your server like it's right there.
AI that writes the code
Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex — tools that take "build me a form that captures leads" and write the actual code. You read it, ask follow-up questions, and ship it. You don't need to type the code yourself.
You can rent your tools forever. Or you can own them once.
Most small businesses end up renting tools they don't fully understand. The vendor goes out of business, raises prices, or removes a feature you depended on — and you're stuck. Owning your tools means none of that touches you.
Own (the Lakeville way)
- $4–12/month, forever. Predictable. Not per-seat. Not per-feature.
- Your code, your data. If you stop paying, you walk away with everything.
- No vendor can leave you stranded. The internet doesn't go out of business.
- The skill compounds. The second tool takes a tenth of the time of the first.
- Build what you need. Not what some PM in San Francisco thought you needed.
Rent (the SaaS way)
- $50–500/month, per seat. Goes up when you grow.
- Their data, their rules. Export usually means "CSV with most fields missing."
- One bad pivot and your workflow vanishes. Ask anyone who used Trello, Skype, or Google Domains.
- You learn their interface. When you switch, you start over.
- Use what they built. Make feature requests. Wait two years.
Real tools real owners have built with this stack.
Not toys. Not "hello world." Actual things that replace SaaS bills, save staff hours, or unlock something the off-the-shelf product couldn't.
Lead intake form
A form on your website. Captures name, email, what they need. Sends you a Google Chat or text. Stores everything in a spreadsheet you control.
Customer Q&A assistant
A chat widget on your site that answers the 30 questions you get asked every week. Pulls from a document you wrote in plain English. Says "I don't know — let me get back to you" when it should.
Inventory or job tracker
A simple page where your team marks items in/out, jobs done, or tasks updated. No more $80/month/seat for a tool with 12 features you don't use.
Quote generator
You paste customer requirements; it drafts a proposal in your voice, with your pricing rules. You read it, edit, send. The judgment stays yours. The typing doesn't.
From "I've never SSH'd anywhere" to "I shipped my first tool" in about six hours.
We won't read slides at you. The whole point is that you'll do this yourself. We'll be in the room while you do, answering questions, fixing things when you hit a wall, and pointing you at the next step.
Get a cloud computer
We'll walk you through making a DigitalOcean account, picking a $4/month droplet, and clicking the button that creates it. You'll have your own server before the coffee gets cold.
Open the door (SSH)
Generate an SSH key on your laptop. Add it to the server. Connect. You'll type one command and see a Linux prompt that's yours. That's the moment most people remember.
Install your AI developer
Claude Code or your tool of choice, running right on your server. We'll show you how to give it just enough context about your business that the code it writes makes sense for you.
Build your first tool
You pick one task — an intake form, a Q&A bot, a tracker. You describe it. AI writes the first version. You read it. You ask for changes. We're there to translate when something doesn't make sense.
Put it on the internet
One more command and your tool has a real web address. Share it with one customer. Watch the first form submission come in. The look on people's faces here is why we do this.
Keep going
You leave with a working tool, an account that's yours, and the next three things you want to build already in your head. We don't sell you a follow-up. The skill is yours now.
At the end of the session, you own everything.
No subscription. No platform we control. No "ask your account manager." If we vanished tomorrow, your tools would keep working.
- Your own server. A real machine on the internet, in your name, billed to your card.
- Your own code. Plain text files you can read, edit, share, or move to another server.
- Your own data. Database files, spreadsheets, logs. Yours. Export means "the actual file."
- Your own skill. The next tool takes you a fraction of the time. The one after that, less still.
- No vendor lock-in. If DigitalOcean disappears, the same code runs on any Linux server in the world.
This website runs on the same model we're teaching.
This site lives on a DigitalOcean droplet. Jan provisioned it in about four minutes. caddy serves the HTML. The whole thing — including the signup form, the email confirmations, the live counter you see at the bottom of the homepage — costs less than a single seat of most SaaS products. Same pattern any business owner can replicate. We're not selling a system we wouldn't run ourselves.