I Built a Freelance Job Hunting Automation on n8n — Here's Everything I Learned

I'm a 17-year-old IT student from Luxembourg. A few months ago I got tired of spending 2-3 hours a day manually browsing Upwork, Malt, and Freelancer looking for projects. So I built an automation system that does it for me — 24/7, on a Raspberry Pi 3. Here's what it does, how I built it, and every painful lesson I learned along the way. What the system does Scans Upwork, Malt, and Freelancer every 30 minutes Scores each job 0–100 with AI based on my profile Generates proposals in English, French, and German Sends the best jobs to Telegram with inline A/B buttons Tracks which proposal style gets more replies Sends daily stats and weekly market trend reports Reminds me to follow up after 3 days The stack n8n — self-hosted workflow automation (Docker on Raspberry Pi 3) Groq API (Llama 3.1-8b-instant) — AI scoring and proposal generation Supabase — PostgreSQL database for jobs, proposals, clients SerpAPI — searching job boards via Google Apify — scraping Upwork listings Telegram Bot API — alerts and bot commands Cloudflare Tunnel — HTTPS for webhooks Total running cost: ~$5/month. 7 workflows 01 - Job Discovery — runs every 30 minutes, searches 10+ sources, deduplicates via Supabase unique constraint on URL 02 - Proposal Generator — AI scores the job, generates two proposal variants (formal vs hook-first), sends to Telegram with A/B buttons 03 - Follow-up Reminders — checks Supabase every 3 days for unanswered proposals 04 - CRM via Telegram — full client management through bot commands (/jobs, /stats, /clients) 05 - Market Intelligence — daily report: how many jobs found, average score, top platforms 06 - Trend Analysis — weekly report on what skills are trending in automation 07 - Lead Generation — finds companies actively using Zapier or Make who might want to switch to n8n Lessons learned (the hard way) 1. Cyrillic text breaks JSON body nodes silently If you have Cyrillic characters in a JSON body field with newlines, n8n throws a "Bad control character" error. Kee