When $2,000/Month Software Costs More Than Your Entire Business: Why Indonesia's Small Traders Are Building With AI I was sitting in a warung in Jakarta last month, watching a woman manage her fabric business on a single Google Sheet. She'd been doing this for twelve years—tracking inventory, customer orders, payment schedules, supplier communications. Everything. In one spreadsheet. When I asked why she didn't use proper business software, she laughed. "Have you seen the prices? Salesforce wants $165 a month. Zoho wants $50. I make maybe $800 a month profit. How is that math supposed to work?" She's not an exception. She's the rule. ## The Math That Doesn't Add Up Indonesia has approximately 65 million small businesses. Most are like hers: sole proprietorships or family operations running on thin margins. A warung owner. A tailoring shop. A small trading company. A freelance consultant working from home. Enterprise software, even the "affordable" versions, typically start at $50-200 per month. To a Jakarta textile trader making $800-1,500 monthly profit, that's 3-25% of their actual earnings. It's not a business expense. It's a luxury tax on being disorganized. So what do they do? They don't organize. They use spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, notebooks, and their own memory. Nothing wrong with that. It works. But it's slow, error-prone, and it means they're spending time on admin work instead of actually growing. ## What Changed? Large language models got cheap. Really cheap. A year ago, using AI for business tasks meant paying OpenAI's API rates or subscribing to expensive platforms. Today, developers can build and deploy AI tools for pennies. That's opened up a weird new market: *what if we could offer actual useful business software for the price of a coffee?* I started thinking about what a small business person actually needs: - Quick customer replies (not leaving chats unread for hours) - Invoice tracking (no more "did they pay that?" confusion) - Simple inventory reminders (before stock runs out) - Appointment scheduling (less back-and-forth on WhatsApp) None of this requires enterprise features. None of this needs fancy dashboards or 47 integrations. It just needs to work reliably and not cost more than the person's daily income. ## Real Examples A furniture maker in Bandung started using AI-powered scheduling. Instead of managing appointments through family group chats, customers now book directly. He saves roughly 4 hours a week on coordination. At his hourly rate, that's meaningful money back in his pocket. A women's clothing seller in Surabaya was drowning in WhatsApp messages. Using simple AI-powered customer communication, her responses are faster, she can handle 3x the inquiries, and she actually sleeps at night instead of checking her phone constantly. A trading company in Medan was losing track of which suppliers had delivered which orders. One simple inventory tracker—AI-powered to catch inconsistencies and flag reorders—and they reduced wasted stock by about 20%. None of these people use Salesforce. None of them ever will. But they all needed *something*, and they needed it to not bankrupt them. ## The Real Question Here's what keeps me up: how many small businesses in Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are solving problems through brute force and manual work because the existing market completely ignores them? We built tools assuming everyone has IT infrastructure, reliable power, good internet, and $50/month to spend on software. Most of the world doesn't match that description. The good news? You don't need to. If you're a developer reading this, there's an actual market here—and a profitable one. Not everyone needs enterprise software. Most small businesses just need something that works, costs less than a meal, and doesn't require a learning curve. The woman with the fabric business? She deserves better than a spreadsheet. And she can actually afford it now. --- I'm building an affordable AI assistant ($2/month) with 50% of revenue going to animal rescue. [simplylouie.com](https://simplylouie.com)