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30 Minutes Saved Every Day — With a $6/Month Automation

·2 mins
Case Studies N8n Automation Gmail Case-Study Ai-Agent
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Sarah manages catering requests for Fuel Bakehouse. Every quote request followed the same five-step manual process: extract customer details from email, populate a spreadsheet, generate a quote in Excel, fill in an email template, attach the PDF, and send it. She was doing this 6 times a day, 6 days per week.

I met Sarah at Dale Beaumont’s AI in Business seminar. A month later, I had something built for her.

What I Built #

An automation workflow that handles most of it. The moment an email arrives, it:

  1. Extracts the customer details
  2. Writes them into her spreadsheet
  3. Generates the email
  4. Attaches the menu PDF
  5. Alerts Sarah to review, attach the quote, and send

Fuel Bakehouse n8n workflow

The Technical Stack #

  • Gmail filter + label to detect incoming quote requests the moment they arrive
  • n8n on a DigitalOcean VPS ($6/month) triggered on that label
  • AI Agent to extract customer details from the email and write them into the right columns in Google Sheets
  • Code nodes to format dates correctly before insertion
  • Auto-generated email: subject, body, dates, menu PDF attached, addressed to the customer
  • Label update to mark emails as processed
  • Telegram alert to Sarah so she can review, generate the quote, attach it, and send
  • Error handler that fires a Telegram message if anything breaks

The Result #

5 minutes saved per quote request.
6 requests a day × 6 days a week = 30 minutes daily, 15 hours a month back in her pocket.
Running cost: $6/month.

The Lesson #

I used to build n8n workflows node by node. Now I use Claude Code to build them in a fraction of the time.

If you’ve mapped out an online process clearly enough that someone new could follow it — AI can be trained to do it too.

With full website access, this project could have expanded to include a Voice AI agent, auto-generated quotes, and a custom order management app. That’s the next conversation.