Paused for lack of Pro

Julia supplies the missing memory, and it rewrites the project’s history: Sanfanson didn’t pause because motivation faded. It paused because the free credits ran out.

The reconstruction: during a family visit to Bucaramanga, Google was handing out free Gemini 2.5 Pro credits. One Sunday of it felt like superpowers, “yo le metía tareas y la cosa no paraba… como que no tenía ningún límite y yo estaba todo feliz” ▸ 13:18. Back home, the Pro spigot closed, leaving only Gemini 2.5 Flash, and the verdict on the smaller model is unsentimental: “Flash es una porquería para programar, comete muchos errores” ▸ 14:04. So the project froze. A month ago the free Pro credits returned, now with daily token limits, which the household engineers around the obvious way: “tenemos como unas 10 cuentas” ▸ 14:15. And the project thawed.

la fuerza laboral de la empresa es una promoción de Google →

The teaching is what this correlation reveals about the new economics of solo building. The constraint on output isn’t hours or ideas anymore; it’s access to frontier-model intelligence, and at zero budget that access arrives as weather, promotions that come and go on Google’s schedule, not yours. A capable model is the difference between “no limits” and “not worth trying”; the gap between Pro and Flash isn’t a discount tier, it’s whether the work happens at all.

The pattern will look familiar to any bootstrapper: the toolchain is the payroll. When your only engineer is a free-tier allocation, roadmaps inherit its expiry date, and remembering why a project stopped requires, as here, a cofounder with a better memory than the git log…