Oetzi for bootstrapped startups: a marketer for $49 a month

No investors means no marketing budget beyond what revenue covers. Oetzi is an AI marketer for bootstrapped startups at $49 a month flat with 100 credits included. It listens on seven platforms for the conversations where your buyers are deciding, scores each one for buying intent, and drafts the reply and the post in your voice. Reading is free, sweeps that find nothing refund, and nothing goes out without your approval.

Where do buyers of a bootstrapped product ask in public?

Where they are trying to avoid a sales call. On Reddit the thread is "cheap alternative to X for a small team" or "what do you use for X, we are three people." On X it is a founder saying the tool they use just raised prices and asking what everyone else moved to. LinkedIn has the ops manager posting "evaluating options for X, small budget, what has worked." Hacker News asks the same in Ask HN. Threads and Bluesky carry the shorter version. Substack Notes has newsletter writers comparing tools in public.

Those threads are full of people who would rather buy from a small company than negotiate with a large one. The what-do-you-use thread is the most common shape, and answering it in the first hour is the highest return marketing a bootstrapper can do.

How does a bootstrapped team run marketing without a hire?

Setup is under five minutes. Paste the URL, Oetzi reads the site and drafts one listening signal per thing you sell. Edit the sentence. The first seven days backfill immediately.

Then the inbox is the daily habit. Each match has a 0 to 100 intent score with the reason written out, and a tag for who is talking. Answer the buyers with one of two reply drafts in your voice. Route the current-customer complaints to whoever handles support. Save the feature requests for the roadmap. Matches also land in Slack when connected and by text.

Once or twice a week, run a drafting pass. One credit gives one to three variants of a post on one platform with the day's trend research included. Publish through Postiz for free. Track the link, and the outcomes ledger shows clicks, signups, and customers without another tool.

What does a bootstrapper actually spend at 100 credits?

Start with the free tier: 10 credits, no card, they never expire. That is five sweeps to see whether the inbox holds anything.

On the plan, a sweep of one signal across every platform is 2 credits and refunds when nothing qualifies. Two signals three times a week is about 48 credits a month before refunds. A drafting run is 1 credit, so six posts a month is 6. A share-of-model check is 2 credits per buying question across five engines, so five questions once a month is 10. That is about 64 credits, and the first payment adds 50 bonus credits. Top-ups are $1 a credit and never expire, so an unused month is not wasted.

Everything else is free: inbox, translation, voice doc, edits, regenerations, publishing, post metrics, the trend scan, tracked links, the outcomes ledger, reports, and API access.

What should a bootstrapped founder not expect?

No cold outreach. Oetzi never messages strangers, never scrapes a list, never sends email on your behalf. It is a marketing tool, not a sales one. Nothing posts without approval. Reply drafts wait for you and autopilot for scheduled posts is off by default. It will not run paid ads or build a funnel. It finds the conversation and drafts your side of it. The rest of the pricing is on one page.

Questions

What is the cheapest AI marketer for a bootstrapped startup?

Oetzi is $49 a month flat with 100 credits included and no per-seat pricing. Reading is free, a sweep that finds nothing refunds, and credits never expire. A bootstrapped team running two signals and a few posts a week uses about two thirds of the included credits. Try it free with 10 credits and no card first.

Do unused Oetzi credits expire?

No. The 10 free credits never expire and neither do top-ups at $1 a credit. Sweeps that find nothing qualifying refund their 2 credits. Failed video renders are free and people graph pulls refund when fewer than three people come back. The metering is built so a quiet month does not cost you.

Is social listening worth it for a bootstrapped startup?

Only if it filters. A keyword alert firehose costs your attention, which a bootstrapper cannot spare. Oetzi scores each match 0 to 100 for buying intent and tags who is talking, so you read five threads a day instead of fifty. Each one comes with two reply drafts in your voice.