Make AI Automation Actually Work: A Guide to Chase Agents

Chase Agents Guides · By Caleb Sakala · December 1, 2025

Sarah was spending 3 hours every morning manually checking 15 different websites for new client leads. Not fun. Not scalable. As the owner of a small marketing agency, she was technically savvy but not a developer. This routine was driving her crazy.

She tried Zapier first. The setup took her 4 hours just to connect 3 webhooks. Then it kept failing. She ended up writing Python scripts instead. Scripts that broke when websites changed their HTML. Scripts that ran at the wrong time. Scripts that she had to maintain.

This isn't Sarah's story. This is everyone's story. Builders like Sarah, like you, like me. We just want to automate the boring stuff.

That's what Chase Agents is really about. I built it because I was tired of complex automation tools that promised everything and delivered nothing.

The Simple Truth About AI Automation

Here's the thing. Most AI automation platforms are built for people who have teams of developers and budgets for complex integrations. The rest of us? We get basic tools that are either too simple or too complicated.

Chase Agents is different. We start you with 20 free messages to try things out. The Auto Model is fine for testing, but it won't win any awards for power. Think of it as a reliable sedan - it gets you where you need to go, but it's not a sports car.

Once you connect your own API key, that's when things get interesting.

Why I Built This (My Story)

Before I dive into how Chase Agents works, let me tell you why I built it in the first place.

Two years ago, I was running a different SaaS company. We had a customer support automation that worked 80% of the time. That other 20%? It was a nightmare. Every time a customer sent a weird request, the automation would fail. Users would get frustrated responses. Support tickets would pile up.

I spent months trying to fix this. I tried different AI models. I built better error handling. I added more human review steps. Nothing worked reliably.

The problem wasn't the AI. The problem was the complexity. Every solution required me to be a full-time automation engineer. I had to manage API keys, webhooks, error handling, rate limits, and a dozen other technical details that had nothing to do with actually helping customers.

I realized that what I really needed was a tool that handled all the plumbing. Something that let me describe what I wanted to happen, and then just made it happen.

That's the idea behind Chase Agents.

The 20 Free Messages: Just Enough to Get Hooked

Every Chase Agents plan gives you 20 free messages on our Auto Model. This isn't some marketing trick. It's a real chance to see if this works for you.

The Auto Model handles straightforward tasks. It can extract basic information from text, generate simple summaries, categorize content, answer direct questions, and process simple workflows.

What it won't do is solve complex, multi-step problems or handle specialized tasks that need deep reasoning. That's not what it's built for. Think of it as a reliable Honda Civic - it'll get you to work, but don't expect to win any races with it.

With your 20 free messages, you can actually test real workflows: get notifications about important Slack messages, monitor websites for changes and alert you, extract data from documents, categorize social media mentions, process simple forms and routing, and generate basic reports.

No credit card required. No fine print. Just 20 messages to see if this makes sense for you.

Where the Real Power Comes From

Once you've used those 20 messages, you can connect your own AI model API key. This is where Chase Agents becomes genuinely useful.

Most automation platforms lock you into their pricing and models. They want you to use their expensive models because that's how they make money. With Chase Agents, we don't care which model you use. We just care that you can use whatever model makes sense for your use case.

With your own API key, you get unlimited usage with no more message limits. Choose your power - OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Hugging Face, Cohere, whatever. Use the right model for the right job. Need to analyze 50-page documents? Use Claude-3. Just need to categorize emails? Use a lightweight model and save money.

You pay the model provider directly. Chase Agents adds zero markup. What you see is what you pay. If OpenAI charges you $0.002 per token, that's exactly what you pay. We don't add a percentage on top.

Switch anytime. Need more power? Use GPT-4. Need to save money? Switch to a cheaper model. Just want to experiment? Try a new open-source model. Easy. Scale up or down based on your actual needs, not what a vendor decides you should use.

How I Actually Use This

Let me show you how I use this personally. I run multiple projects. Each needs different things.

My main project uses GPT-4 for writing technical documentation and handling complex user support. The reasoning required for these tasks is worth the higher cost.

But I have a smaller project that just categorizes customer feedback. For that, I use Mistral's 7B model. It works perfectly for simple classification and costs me 90% less than GPT-4.

My team settings default to GPT-4 for most tasks. But I personally override that for simpler workflows. I save hundreds of dollars this way without sacrificing quality where it actually matters.

I also experiment with open-source models. Last month, I tested a new model on Hugging Face for summarizing customer support tickets. It was just as good as the commercial models and completely free. Now I use it for all my summarization tasks.

OpenRouter Makes This Easy

Managing multiple API keys from different providers is a pain. That's why I recommend OpenRouter to most users.

OpenRouter is basically a unified API for all major AI models. One key, one dashboard, one billing. OpenRouter handles the switching between models automatically. One day I might use Anthropic's Claude, the next day Mistral, the next day a custom model. All through the same interface. All with the same API key.

The pricing is usually better than going direct to each provider too. OpenRouter negotiates bulk pricing and passes the savings to users.

Here's what I love about OpenRouter: I can test different models with the same automation, I get automatic fallbacks if a model goes down, I can see real-time cost comparisons, I can switch between models without changing code, and I get unified billing and usage analytics.

Security: How We Actually Protect Your Keys

I get it. Putting API keys anywhere feels risky. So let me explain exactly how we handle this.

Your keys never touch our systems in plain text. They're encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption. They only get decrypted when your automation runs. Then they're immediately destroyed from memory.

We never log your keys. They don't appear in chat history, error logs, or any AI model context. We don't see your keys. The AI models don't see your keys. Only the actual model provider sees your key when it processes your request.

Keys go directly from your workspace to your chosen AI provider - only when needed. They never touch our servers in a usable form.

This is the only secure way to handle API keys. We've implemented this exactly like how Stripe handles payment information. Industry standard, battle-tested security.

Sarah's Real Workflow (Now)

Remember Sarah from the beginning? Her Chase Agent setup now looks like this: 7:30 AM daily, Chase Agent wakes up and starts running. Check 15 websites - for each website, it navigates to the leads section and extracts new prospects using GPT-3.5 for simple extraction. Clean and deduplicate - removes duplicates and formats the data consistently using lightweight model. Prioritize leads - uses GPT-4 to analyze lead quality based on company size, industry match, and website activity (needs deep reasoning here). Email Sarah - sends her a summary with high-priority leads highlighted in green, medium priority in yellow. Update CRM - automatically adds all leads to her Salesforce account with proper categorization.

Total cost per day: About $0.12 (mostly for the GPT-4 prioritization). Total time saved: 3 hours per day. Time to set up the automation: 2 hours one time.

This is the kind of flexibility you get when you can choose your models based on what you actually need. Sarah's automation uses the right tool for each step, keeping costs low while maintaining quality where it matters.

Common Use Cases I See

After watching hundreds of builders use Chase Agents, I see the same patterns. Here are the most common workflows:

Customer Support Automation: Monitor email or help desk for new tickets, use powerful AI to understand the issue and suggest solutions, route simple issues to automated responses, flag complex issues for human review. Cost: $20-50 per month for most small businesses.

Content Workflow Automation: Monitor social media mentions of your brand, use AI to categorize positive vs negative feedback, route complaints to customer success team, generate response drafts for team review. Cost: $10-30 per month for most creators.

Sales Process Automation: Monitor website for new form submissions, use AI to score lead quality based on your criteria, route high-quality leads to sales team immediately, schedule follow-up tasks for medium-quality leads. Cost: $25-75 per month for most sales teams.

Data Processing Automation: Monitor email attachments for spreadsheets, use AI to extract and categorize data, clean and format the data, add to your business database with proper tagging. Cost: $15-40 per month for most data processing.

The Technical Details (For Builders)

If you're a technical builder, you might want to know how this actually works. Chase Agents has two main components: The Automation Engine - this handles scheduling, error handling, and workflow management. The AI Integration Layer - this connects to your AI models and handles prompt optimization.

When you create an automation, you describe what you want to happen. The automation engine breaks this down into steps. For AI tasks, it sends optimized prompts to your chosen model. We handle the boring stuff automatically: rate limiting and throttling, error recovery and retry logic, data validation and cleaning, cost optimization and monitoring, and security and encryption. You just focus on what you want to accomplish.

The Complete Setup

Here's exactly how you get from Sarah's 3-hour manual process to her 10-minute automated one:

Week 1: Testing Phase - Sign up for free and get your 20 messages, set up your first simple automation like website monitoring, experience how the Auto Model works for basic tasks, test the interface and workflow builder, no credit card, no commitment.

Week 2: API Key Setup - Get an OpenRouter account or direct API keys from providers, connect your first API key to Chase Agents, test the same automation with a more powerful model, compare results and costs, start thinking about your specific use cases.

Week 3: Real Workflow - Build your first real business workflow, use Auto Model for simple steps and powerful models for complex reasoning, set up team settings and personal overrides, monitor costs and performance, fine-tune your prompts and model selection.

Week 4: Optimization - Switch models based on performance and cost, add error handling and backup workflows, set up notifications and reporting, train your team on the new automations, start planning your next workflow.

Month 2+: Scale and Expand - Add more complex automations, experiment with custom models, build team-wide workflows, start reducing your manual work significantly, measure the actual time and cost savings.

Why This Matters

What we're really building here is freedom. Freedom from vendor lock-in. Freedom from complex setups. Freedom from paying for power you don't need.

Traditional AI platforms want you to believe you need their expensive, proprietary solution. They make you dependent on their models, their pricing, and their roadmap.

The truth is, most of the time you just need a simple, reliable tool that does what you tell it to do. The AI model you use should be a technical implementation detail, not a business decision.

Chase Agents is that tool. We give you the freedom to use whatever AI makes sense for your use case. No more, no less.

Common Mistakes I See (And How to Avoid Them)

After watching hundreds of builders set up automations, I see the same mistakes over and over:

Mistake 1: Overcomplicating the first workflow - Start simple. Really simple. Like check this one website and send me an email if something changes. Get that working perfectly before adding complexity.

Mistake 2: Not considering cost optimization - Don't use GPT-4 for everything. Use lightweight models for simple tasks, save the expensive models for complex reasoning. This can reduce your costs by 80% without losing quality.

Mistake 3: Not testing edge cases - Plan for failure. What happens if the website is down? What if the AI returns an unexpected response? Build error handling from the start.

Mistake 4: Trying to automate everything at once - Pick one workflow, make it bulletproof, then move to the next. Don't try to automate your entire business in week one.

Mistake 5: Not monitoring costs and performance - Set up alerts for when your automations fail or costs spike. I use Chase Agents to monitor Chase Agents - it's that reliable.

Getting Started for Real

If you want to try this yourself: Sign up for free and get your 20 messages, connect one service that you actually use like Slack or email, describe one task that you hate doing manually, bring your API key when you're ready to scale, and experiment with different models and see what works.

I want to know: what's the one repetitive task in your workflow that you wish you could just automate away? The one that takes up your time but adds no real value to your business?

Is it checking websites for updates? Categorizing customer emails? Processing invoices? Updating spreadsheets? Something else? Let me know in the comments. I might write a guide specifically on how to automate your exact use case.

Chase Agents is built for builders who want to get things done without the complexity. Start free. Scale your way. Stay in control.