AI Toolkit Cheat Sheet

Start by picking a single task that's eating your time — sorting incoming emails, tagging leads, copying data between Google Sheets and your CRM, generating weekly reports. Don't try to automate everything at once.

In Make or n8n, you build the workflow visually: a trigger (new email, form submission, scheduled time) → a processing step that calls an AI model to classify, summarize, or draft → an action (update the sheet, send a Slack message, file the document). Make is friendlier for beginners and has EU data centres. n8n gives you more control and can be self-hosted on your own EU server for full data sovereignty.

Both have free tiers that are enough to get started. A typical first workflow takes 30–60 minutes to build and saves several hours per week from day one.

Non-technical shortcut: you can ask an AI chat (Claude.ai or Mistral Le Chat) to build the whole workflow for you as an importable JSON file. Describe in plain English what you want — what triggers it, what data to pull, what the AI should do with it, where the result goes — and ask for the finished n8n JSON. Then in n8n: open a new workflow → click the ⋯ menu → Import from File (or paste the JSON directly onto the canvas). The entire workflow appears with nodes pre-wired, ready for you to plug in your credentials.

Example prompt you can copy, paste, and adapt:

I want to build a workflow in n8n that helps me keep track of what's happening in Luxembourg's networking scene, so I don't have to check the Network website every week.

Here's what I'd like it to do:

1. Go to https://thenetwork.lu/events/events-calendar/ and grab the page.
2. Pull out the useful bits for each event — the title, date, time, whether it's online or in person, where it is, a short description, and the link.
3. Send those events to an AI model to sort and summarise them into a weekly digest aimed at busy small business owners. I'd like the events grouped into three buckets:
   🔥 High relevance — technology, leadership
   📋 Worth knowing — workshops, training, networking
   😸 Fun — drinks and aperos
4. Email the digest to me via Gmail.

A few setup notes:

• I'm using n8n cloud.
• For the AI step, I'm calling Mistral through OpenRouter, with Bearer token auth. The model is mistral-medium-3.
• I am non-technical. I need everything as set up as possible with clear instructions on how to attach my OpenRouter and Gmail credentials.
• Please use as few steps as possible. Simplify where it makes sense.
• Please give me the finished workflow as a JSON file I can import straight into n8n.

Both are free chat interfaces with no setup — open the link in your browser, sign up, and start typing. Paste your text and describe what you want: "summarize in 3 bullets," "rewrite in a formal tone," "extract the action items from this meeting."

Mistral Le Chat is EU-hosted in France, GDPR-native, and fastest for European languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc.). Claude.ai is stronger for nuanced writing, long documents (up to 200,000 words in one prompt), and structured reasoning tasks like reviewing contracts or analyzing spreadsheets.

The free tiers are enough for occasional use. Paid plans (~€20/month) unlock the most capable models, longer documents, and higher daily limits.

You have three realistic routes, depending on how technical you want to get and whether the recording needs to stay private:

1. Free, on your own computer (most private): Install Whisper locally. Technical users run it as a Python command (whisper recording.mp3 --model medium.en). Non-technical users can use a friendly desktop app like MacWhisper (Mac) or Buzz (Mac/Windows/Linux) — drag, drop, transcribe. Nothing ever leaves your device.

2. Free through a chat tool: Upload the audio to Mistral Le Chat or Claude.ai and ask it to transcribe and summarize in one step. Fastest for one-off recordings — but the audio leaves your device.

3. Paid API (best for high volume or live): Deepgram Nova-3 is faster, more accurate with accents, and supports real-time captions. Around €0.40/hour — call it from Make or n8n in an automated pipeline.

For one-off scans or simple PDFs: upload the file to Mistral Le Chat or Claude.ai and ask for the extracted text, tables, or specific fields. Free, instant, no setup.

For automated pipelines (invoices arriving daily, an archive of documents to digitize, contracts to process): call the Mistral OCR API from a Make or n8n workflow. It handles complex layouts, tables, and multi-language documents in one pass. EU-hosted.

For structured field extraction (invoice number, VAT, dates, line items into a database): Google Document AI has pre-trained "processors" for invoices, receipts, IDs, and forms. Azure Document Intelligence is the comparable Microsoft offering — strongest for forms.

Softr lets you ship a login-protected client portal in an afternoon. Use their built-in database (no separate tool needed) or connect an existing Google Sheet, Airtable, or Notion workspace. Out of the box you get user authentication, per-client content, file uploads, forms, and a clean mobile-friendly design.

The free tier covers small portals. The €49/month plan unlocks custom domains, more users, and payment gating. If you want more design control or custom interactions, WeWeb is the next step up — still no-code, but closer to a full web framework.

Typical starter build: client login → dashboard with their projects/invoices → file upload area → contact form. One afternoon, zero code.

Two practical rules: keep the data inside the EU, and prefer EU-hosted models.

Route your API calls through EUrouter or Requesty EU instead of OpenRouter. Both are Frankfurt-hosted with zero cross-border transfer — meaning your customer data never touches US servers, even in transit.

Pick Mistral models as your default. French-hosted, GDPR-native, and competitive on quality. Reserve US-hosted models (Claude, GPT) for tasks that don't involve personal data, or only after you have a signed DPA in place.

Document it. Add your AI tools to your processing register (GDPR Art. 30), note where each provider hosts data, and include them in your privacy policy. For platforms like Make, choose the EU data region at setup — it's a one-click decision that's much harder to reverse later.

Instead of juggling separate accounts, API keys, and monthly bills with OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Google, and the rest, use one router. You get a single API key, one dashboard, one invoice, and can swap between models by changing a single string in your workflow or code.

OpenRouter has the largest selection (200+ models) but is US-based. EUrouter and Requesty EU are the EU-sovereign alternatives — fewer models, but your data stays in Europe.

All are pay-per-use — no monthly fees, no minimums. You only pay for tokens actually used. For a typical small-business workload, that's usually a few euros per month.

Picking an EU host (Scaleway, Hetzner, OVH) keeps you out of cross-border-transfer trouble. See Hosting for starter options.

Audit your own forms. Don't collect a birthday you'll never use.

One sentence each on a checklist: who is logged in, what role they have, what records that role can touch. Row-Level Security in Postgres makes this enforceable, not just policy.

GDPR in four verbs. Build a "download my data" and "delete my account" path before launch — they're easier to add early than retrofit.

Before the cookie banner. Name your sub-processors (hosting, AI APIs, email tools). Plain language beats legalese every time.

Don't share your .env file with your AI coding tool. Keep secrets separate — or swap to real values manually before launch.