It seems like the internet is flooded with AI Resume Builders nowadays, they all look the same and do the same thing, so the obvious solution is to add even more fuel to the fire, but this time without the thousands % markup the intermediaries graciously add for using their service.

Why people bother making so many of these

The grift is simple: bait the users with free stuff and unsubstantiated promises of success(like a site with 0 traffic claiming to have helped thousands of job seekers and increasing interview rates to 40%), and hit them with a paywall.

They give users one free API call that costs them a half of a cent, show the job seeker that the AI thing works, then add a paywall to block the user from doing anything more on the platform, while still ranking on search engines for "Free AI resume builder" despite being anything but that.

A lot of the time they ask for $10-$30 monthly to let people keep using the AI tailoring features. My problem with that, is that users will rarely tailor 2000 to 6000 resumes monthly to justify the costs of the subscription, so the proposal I come with is this: if you're someone looking to use a lot of AI resume tailoring, don't pay someone else for it. Buy your own tokens and do it for 1/1000th of the cost. Really.

How to avoid falling for the trap

Check out this open source repository I created to allow people to see and test for themselves how much resume generation actually costs when using mainstream AI models at

You can run it locally, or find it deployed and linked on that page if you'd rather not go through the hassle.

Get a OpenAI API key with a low budget, say $1-5$, download the code and run it locally, add your key, and access most of the stuff these websites sell - import resumes, tailor them, get ats scores(which should never be taken as ground truth btw, they're always just informational at best).

The resume generated is an actually decent template designed to avoid most formatting issues for ATS providers, no fancy obstructive designs, and the cost is usually less than a cent per operation, especially for the mini models.