How I Built ProjectHub: An Embeddable AI Recruiter Assistant That Runs on Free Tiers

I built a chat widget for my portfolio. One script tag, drop it on a page, and recruiters can ask questions about my projects, my AWS internship, what I actually know, and what kind of roles I'm looking for. I named the assistant Scout. <script src= "https://bradleymatera.github.io/ProjectHub/ProjectHub.js" ></script> That's the whole pitch from the outside. What it took to get there is a lot messier than one script tag suggests. The current version has a vanilla JS frontend, a Node backend on a Google Cloud e2-micro VM, a knowledge base pulled from GitHub, a network of free LLM providers, a response cache, per-tab memory, safety checks, a self-improvement loop, and an analytics dashboard. It also has six test suites and more documentation than I expected. The one rule I kept coming back to: it had to stay useful without me paying for AI traffic. Why I built this in the first place My portfolio is scattered. Projects live on GitHub, demos live on various subdomains, blog posts are on the site, certifications are listed somewhere, and my actual AWS internship experience is explained in a few different places. A motivated recruiter could piece it all together, but most recruiters are not motivated. They are busy. I realized I was asking them to do homework. That seemed backwards. So I thought, what if they could just ask? Scout is supposed to answer straight questions like "What is Bradley's strongest project?" or "Does he actually have production AWS experience?" or "What does he want to be paid?" It doesn't pretend to be me, doesn't inflate my title, and doesn't try to sell me as a senior engineer when I'm not one. It just answers from verified stuff. The architecture Three layers. Site loads one script. The script hits the backend. The backend either answers from the knowledge base or falls through to free LLM providers. flowchart TD A[Website or portfolio] -->|loads one script| B[ProjectHub widget on GitHub Pages] B -->|POST /api/chat| C[Node.js API on a GCP e2-mi